If you have ever been to Tyler’s website HeightQuest.Com you might have trouble understanding much of what he posts or write about on height increase. His articles are indeed very technical and for a person without a solid molecular biology or genetic educational background, it will be very hard to decipher.
I remember finding the Quest For Height blog maybe 5 years ago when I was trying to gain height myself and I couldn’t figure out what he was talking, and I had majored back in school in something related to chemistry. As I was doing research for this website, it was inevitable that I would be required to read over his findings and discoveries in his journey. Remember what Newton stated in his address to Hooke, “If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants…” There is no way I would have gotten as far this quickly without the research already done by people before me like Sky (Ryan Nguyen), Tyler Christopher Davis , Harald (from Biomedical Growth Research Initiative), Hakker, and many others who have shown the way for people like me.
When I started to read over his writings again, I made a commitment to myself to do as much research and studying as possible to fully understand what he is talking about. There are many terms he uses like “up-regulation”, “down-regulation”, “inhibit”, “promote” , “gene expression”, etc. I am going to trying to explain for the reader what these terms mean in simple language, and also try to synthesize and outline what Tyler’s research has been on for the last 4 years.
Analysis & Interpretation:
When Tyler talks about up-regulation and down-regulation what he is talking about is a phenomenon in genetics dealing with the idea that from different quantities, concentrations, and intensity of external stimuli, whether chemical, mechanical, biological, etc. the stimuli will change something in the environment outside the cell. The change on the outside will then make a change on the inside of the cell. That means that the signal that are transduced and sent into the cell are also modified. Depending on how which genes get light up and activated in each the nucleus of almost all cells, the genes would make the proteins they are supposed to make, thus changing the nature and function of the cells.
So when the term “up-regulated” appears, that means that through some external (maybe also internal) effect, the areas in the genome of the nucleus which correspond to certain genes will get “light up” or activated more than other areas of the genome. When this happens, those areas or genes will make a certain type of protein. Will an increase in a certain type of protein, certain pathways and signals are more liekly to happen and increase in number. This might mean cell proliferation or differentiate, which is what we are hoping to do when we take the stem cells from the bone marrow and force them to turn into cartilage cells so that they can possibly develop into a new cartilage in long bones ie. growth plate. The science and idea is what I would say is a long shot but it is something worth considering.
The function of all genes is to make proteins.
As for the overall out line of Tyler’s work, it seems that what Tyler has been focused mainly on in his work is to prove that there is a non-invasive, cheap and simple to implement, exercise like, method to increasing in height and that is known as Lateral Synovial Joint Loading, LSJL for short. He states that he didn’t want to even start writing the blog on the subject on height increase until he was inspired by Sky and his work and website EasyHeight.Com. He also waited until he was sure that he had found a real legitimate way to increase height before talking about the subject. This was a very smart move because this way, he had a solution to his readers problems and desires right from the beginning. All he had to do then was to find studies and tests done to validate this method and idea.
From what I have seen, it appears that he has applied the LSJL technique on himself and have been refining the method for maybe over 3 years now. His measured gains is 1.5 inches in extra height, which is a very noticeable and large gain, and we are quite positive that his growth plates had closed by the time he started to try out the LSJL method. This seems to give clear evidence that his promoted technique LSJL really does work.
Most of his articles is to prove that using just advanced knowledge on how endochondral ossification, the various growth factors, endocrinology, and genetics work, one can figure out how to really increase one’s height legitimately using clever body hacks.
The basis on his ideas seems to be in finding any way possible to get the mesenchymal stem cells and other types of progenitor cells like Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) in the inter medullary bone cavity of the epiphysis ends of the long bones to differentiate at a faster level or rate into chondrocytes. Theoretically the chondrocytes will then release the right types of excretions like Collagen fibers and other proteoglycans in the right order to allow for more chondrocytes to be created. If then the chondrocytes can be signaled to increase in size aka hypertrophy then the number of chondrocytes can push the bones around them to expand. This is due to both an increase in the hydrostatic pressure and the increase in size of chondrocytes. remember that the chondrocytes in the growth plates has to hypertrophy to an increase size of up to 10X in the hypertrophy zone which is one of the steps needed that leads to real longitudinal growth in the endochondral ossification process.
In addition, Tyler also is looking at how the different proteins, hormones, and genes are linked together in what way. Remember that the purpose of genes are to create proteins. supposedly, (at least from my knowledge on genes) one specific type of gene will create only type specific type of gene, in a one to one relationship.
This means that one gene leads to one type of protein. That protein which can be either a hormone, enzyme, transcription factor, ligand, binding factor, etc can have many different roles and functions in the body. Since we are only interested in figuring out how to make ourselves taller, we are focusing only on the proteins that have been already discovered by other researchers to be linked to the endochondral ossification process, the chondrogenesis process, and the hormone signaling process.
We call the proteins that are involved growth factors, but there are also other small molecules which are involved as well but not in a growth promoting way. There are the Bone Morphogenetic Proteins (BMPs), the fibroblast growth factors (FGFs), the hedgehog signals (like IHH), the entire transforming growth factor beta family (TGF-beta), the parathyroid hormone and its receptors (PTH and PTHrP), the Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), the insulin like growth factors (IGF-1 and IGF-2), growth hormone or somatotropin (GH), but also things like the Estrogen receptors alpha and beta, the different types of Collagen, but specifically Type- II, Type-IX, Type-X, Typer-XI, the proteoglacan group members like agreccan, etc. and others that play smaller roles.
There are certain types of genes that comes up over and over again that show to have very big influences on how growth occurs like SOX9 and RUNx2 and HGMA2 and he (and others in this endeavor) are all trying to figure out how all of this stuff connects to each other. In a way, this is very much like a big jigsaw puzzle and we are looking at each compound to see how it fits with the other compounds, signals, and proteins to see how they either promote or inhibit the behavior of others. There are indeed many steps and parts of the process which we haven’t found yet which represent the missing jigsaw puzzle pieces and that will take time to find.
There are already people like me and him who are trying to create large networks with all the pieces linked to each other. For me, I am looking to see and figure out which signals or compounds are the critical ones. The critical compounds are either the process initiating compounds or the compounds that are process and rate limiting. If we can figure out these compounds, we can thus implement and apply some type of external stimuli through say an electrical signal or mechanical load, cause the initial process beginning compounds to gain or increase their expression and numbers. This would push the growing process forward and to be faster. If we then also fire out which compounds are the rate limiting ones, the ones that are the weak link and cause the bottleneck in the speed of the growing process, we can then hack those steps to increase either their numbers or their speed of function. These two elements and functions would then allow people to grow at a faster rate and attain a height ultimate height. If we then understand the process even better and at a greater detail ,we can create better, less invasive, cheaper, and faster surgical or even non-surgical ways to increase our height.
For references, let’s look at what Wikipedia says about gene regulation and gene expression.(available HERE and HERE).
Gene expression is the process by which information from a gene is used in the synthesis of a functional gene product. These products are often proteins, but in non-protein coding genes such as ribosomal RNA (rRNA), transfer RNA (tRNA) or small nuclear RNA (snRNA) genes, the product is a functional RNA. The process of gene expression is used by all known life – eukaryotes (including multicellular organisms), prokaryotes (bacteria and archaea), possibly induced by viruses – to generate the macromolecular machinery for life. Several steps in the gene expression process may be modulated, including thetranscription, RNA splicing, translation, and post-translational modification of a protein. Gene regulation gives the cell control over structure and function, and is the basis for cellular differentiation, morphogenesis and the versatility and adaptability of any organism. Gene regulation may also serve as a substrate for evolutionary change, since control of the timing, location, and amount of gene expression can have a profound effect on the functions (actions) of the gene in a cell or in a multicellular organism.
In genetics, gene expression is the most fundamental level at which the genotype gives rise to the phenotype. The genetic code stored in DNA is “interpreted” by gene expression, and the properties of the expression give rise to the organism’s phenotype. Such phenotypes are often expressed by the synthesis of proteins that control the organism’s shape, or that act as enzymes catalysing specific metabolic pathways characterising the organism.
Regulation of gene expression
Regulation of gene expression refers to the control of the amount and timing of appearance of the functional product of a gene. Control of expression is vital to allow a cell to produce the gene products it needs when it needs them; in turn this gives cells the flexibility to adapt to a variable environment, external signals, damage to the cell, etc. Some simple examples of where gene expression is important are:
More generally gene regulation gives the cell control over all structure and function, and is the basis for cellular differentiation, morphogenesis and the versatility and adaptability of any organism.
Any step of gene expression may be modulated, from the DNA-RNA transcription step to post-translational modification of a protein. The stability of the final gene product, whether it is RNA or protein, also contributes to the expression level of the gene – an unstable product results in a low expression level. In general gene expression is regulated through changes in the number and type of interactions between molecules that collectively influence transcription of DNA and translation of RNA.