A hippocampal cell expresses a mobilized, GFP-tagged LINE-1 element (green). All nuclei are in blue.SALK INSTITUTESome mouse mothers groom, lick, and nurse their babies more than others. In a study published in Science today (March 23), researchers demonstrate that this natural variation in maternal behavior is linked to the structure of pups’ genomes, specifically, the activation of one of the most common jumping genes in the genome, LINE-1.
“What’s fascinating about the paper is the connection between experience, epigenetics, and restructuring of the genome,” says Moshe Szyf, a geneticist at McGill University in Montreal who did not participate in the work. “We usually think about epigenetics changes that don’t change the sequence, but here there was a connection of the maternal care, the change in methylation . . . and then restructuring.”
Coauthor Tracy Bedrosian, who did the work as a postdoc at the Salk Institute and is now a scientist at Ohio-based Neurotechnology Innovations Translator, and her colleagues did not set out to study maternal behavior. Instead, they wanted to explore the effects of maternal stress and environmental enrichment on the retrotransposon LINE-1 (L1), which can copy and paste itself into new ...
