Summary: Children whose mothers smoked during pregnancy are more likely to have problems like low birth weight, asthma, and possibly obesity, cancer, and high blood pressure. For clues into the mechanism behind these effects, scientists are looking to the epigenome, the personalized set of directions that tells our cells how and when to produce proteins, which is one of the ways gene activity is controlled. In this podcast Stephanie London and Bonnie Joubert discuss the results of their recent study in which they identified a set of genes with methylation changes present at birth in children whose mothers smoked during pregnancy.
