![Michael Skinner portrait](https://wpcdn.web.wsu.edu/wp-cas/uploads/sites/648/2013/02/skinner-michael-2012-100.jpg)
Washington State University researchers say environmental factors are having an underappreciated effect on the course of disease and evolution by prompting genetic mutations through epigenetics, a process by which genes are turned on and off independent of an organism’s DNA sequence.
Their assertion is a dramatic shift in how we might think of disease and evolution’s underlying biology and “changes how we think about where things come from,” said Michael Skinner, founding director of the Center for Reproductive Biology in WSU’s School of Biological Sciences.
Skinner and colleagues Carlos Guerrero-Bosagna and M. M. Haque present their findings in the latest issue of the journal Epigenetics.