Phenotypic Expression – Analogy (Gray Hair)

Transcript

We talked about the way that you develop these genes or inherit these genes. You can test for them genetically, but it’s actually more important to see your phenotypic expression or your outward expression of these. A nice analogy is hair color. You can inherit brown hair from your parents, but what happens when you’re 70 and the hairs turned gray? That doesn’t mean that your genes or your genetic makeup has changed to gray hair. That just means that phenotypically you’re no longer expressing the brown hair. It’s now gray. Your outward expression is gray hair. Similarly, these receptors decrease with age, and so as you get older, they tend to wear down. It’s kind of nice – there are ways that you can test and that’s part of this taste test that we’ve developed to now allow people to know what their current level expression is. But then now we’re figuring out ways to actually increase the expression of these receptors, and so trying to bring people back up to their maximized level of expression.