WIKIMEDIA, SEWERYN OLKOWICZ The effects of malnutrition in the late stages of a female mouse’s pregnancy can produce epigenetic changes in the sperm of her male offspring. While prenatal undernourishment had previously been shown to result in metabolic disease for two subsequent generations, a study published today (July 10) in Science is the first to demonstrate the extent to which an expecting mother’s nutrition can affect the methylation of DNA in the germ cells of her offspring.
“This is a fairly compelling demonstration that the epigenome is plastic to some extent, able to be modified by the environment,” said Oliver Rando, who studies epigenetic inheritance at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, but was not involved in the work. “This is probably one of the more expansive demonstrations of this.”
Geneticist Anne Ferguson-Smith from the University of Cambridge in the U.K., along with endocrinologist Mary-Elizabeth Patti at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston and their colleagues, decreased by half the caloric intake of mice during their last week of pregnancy, when epigenetic reprogramming of male germ cells occurs. Assessing the genome-wide methylation state of the sperm of the first-generation sons of undernourished mothers, the researchers found that these sperm had 111 hypomethylated ...
