In Their Earliest Days, Embryos Record Their Environments

Methylation patterns at so-called metastable epialleles in the genome stamp a memory into each of our cells.

kerry grens
| 4 min read

Register for free to listen to this article
Listen with Speechify
0:00
4:00
Share

ABOVE: Children in Keneba, The Gambia, including this hours-old baby, are part of a long-term investigation into the epigenetics of nutrition and health.
FELICIA WEBB

Summertime in The Gambia, a tiny West African country of rivers, salt flats, and baobab trees, means the start of the rainy season. “Everything is turning green,” says nutrition scientist Andrew Prentice over the phone from his home in the rural village of Keneba. “It’s gorgeous.” Prentice leads the UK’s Medical Research Council International Nutrition Group station in Keneba, about three hours’ drive from the main MRC unit in Fajara, near the coast.

For the subsistence farmers in Keneba, the rainy season is also the hungry season; stores of last year’s harvest run low, and the next round of crops is just being planted. The cyclical nature of the villagers’ nutrition has provided what Prentice calls an “experiment of nature” that he and his colleagues can ...

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of

The Scientist Logo
Receive full access to digital editions of The Scientist, as well as TS Digest, feature stories, more than 35 years of archives, and much more!
Already a member? Login Here

Keywords

Meet the Author

  • kerry grens

    Kerry Grens

    Kerry served as The Scientist’s news director until 2021. Before joining The Scientist in 2013, she was a stringer for Reuters Health, the senior health and science reporter at WHYY in Philadelphia, and the health and science reporter at New Hampshire Public Radio. Kerry got her start in journalism as a AAAS Mass Media fellow at KUNC in Colorado. She has a master’s in biological sciences from Stanford University and a biology degree from Loyola University Chicago.

Published In

October 2018

Bright Lights, Big Problems

Scientists are exploring the ecological damage caused by artificially lit night skies

Share
3D illustration of a gold lipid nanoparticle with pink nucleic acid inside of it. Purple and teal spikes stick out from the lipid bilayer representing polyethylene glycol.
February 2025, Issue 1

A Nanoparticle Delivery System for Gene Therapy

A reimagined lipid vehicle for nucleic acids could overcome the limitations of current vectors.

View this Issue
Considerations for Cell-Based Assays in Immuno-Oncology Research

Considerations for Cell-Based Assays in Immuno-Oncology Research

Lonza
An illustration of animal and tree silhouettes.

From Water Bears to Grizzly Bears: Unusual Animal Models

Taconic Biosciences
Sex Differences in Neurological Research

Sex Differences in Neurological Research

bit.bio logo
New Frontiers in Vaccine Development

New Frontiers in Vaccine Development

Sino

Products

Tecan Logo

Tecan introduces Veya: bringing digital, scalable automation to labs worldwide

Explore a Concise Guide to Optimizing Viral Transduction

A Visual Guide to Lentiviral Gene Delivery

Takara Bio
Inventia Life Science

Inventia Life Science Launches RASTRUM™ Allegro to Revolutionize High-Throughput 3D Cell Culture for Drug Discovery and Disease Research

An illustration of differently shaped viruses.

Detecting Novel Viruses Using a Comprehensive Enrichment Panel

Twist Bio