HENNIG ET AL.
Maternal nutrition around the time of conception can affect the regulatory tagging of her child’s DNA from the earliest embryonic stages, according to a study published today (April 29) in Nature Communications, which focused on a population of women and children in Gambia.
The West African country has distinct rainy and dry seasons that dictate its inhabitants’ diets, making nutrition easy to track. Branwen Hennig from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and her colleagues sought to determine whether Gambian women’s nutrition at conception affected their infants’ patterns of DNA tags, or methyl groups. The researchers profiled maternal blood samples, looking for nutrients linked to methylation, and examined methylation patterns of infant hair and blood DNA, homing in on specific sites called metastable ...
