There is evidence of a link between intergenerational epigenetic trauma, environmental adversity, and resilience. Resiliency is an adaptive response associated with lower psychopathology and a suite of specific physiological changes including alterations in cortisol levels regulating the inflammatory immune response and resistance to telomere shortening in response to stress. The feedback loops linking environment and human genomes are modified by resilient behaviors. In Legacy African Americans, resilience has emerged as a continuum of responses within the context of family, community, and religious beliefs as a consequence of Intergenerational exposures to 250 years of chattel slavery followed by 150 years of systemic discrimination. This resilience has ameliorated but not eliminated the impact of this trauma over approximately 16 generations of exposure. We suggest that resilience can exhibit a range of sustainability with protracted resilience involving deep behavioral modifications and concomitant physiochemical changes whereas superficial resilience may also show surface behavioral adjustments but is skin-deep and lacks the consistent physiochemical alterations of successful long term adaptation.
Data science has made great strides in harnessing the power of big data to improve human life across a broad spectrum of disciplines. Unfortunately this informational richesse is not equitably spread across human populations. Vulnerable populations remain both under-studied and under-consulted on the use of data derived from their communities. This lack of inclusion of vulnerable populations as data collectors, data analyzers and data beneficiaries significantly restrains the utility of big data applications that contribute to human well-ness. Here we present three case studies: (1) Describing a novel genomic dataset being developed with clinical and ethnographic insights in African Americans, (2) Demonstrating how a tutorial that enables data scientists from vulnerable populations to better understand criminal justice bias using the COMPAS dataset, and (3) investigating how Indigenous genomic diversity contributes to future biomedical interventions. These cases represent some of the outstanding challenges that big data science presents when addressing vulnerable populations as well as the innovative solutions that expanding science participation brings.
Exposure to violence (ETV) has been linked to epigenomics mechanisms such as DNA methylation (DNAm). We used epigenetic profiling of blood collected from 32 African American young adult males who lived in Washington DC to determine if changes in DNAm at CpG sites affiliated with nervous and immune system were associated with exposure to violence. Pathway analysis of differentially methylated regions comparing high and low ETV groups revealed an enrichment of gene sets annotated to nervous system and immune ontologies. Many of these genes are known to interact with each other which suggests DNAm alters gene function in the nervous and immune system in response to ETV. Using data from a unique age group, young African American adult males, we provide evidence that lifetime ETV could impact DNA methylation in genes impacted at Central Nervous System and Immune Function sites. Method Methylation analysis was performed on DNA collected from the blood of participants classified with either high or low lifetime ETV. Illumina®MethylationEPIC Beadchips (~850k CpG sites) were processed on the iScan System to examine whole-genome methylation differences. Differentially methylated CpG-sites between high (n = 19) and low (n = 13) groups were identified using linear regression with violence and substance abuse as model covariates. Gene ontology analysis was used to identify enrichment categories from probes annotated to the nearest gene. Results A total of 595 probes (279 hypermethylated; 316 hypomethylated) annotated to 383 genes were considered differentially methylated in association with ETV. Males with high ETV showed elevated methylation in several signaling pathways but were most impacted at Central Nervous System and Immune Function affiliated sites. Eight candidate genes were identified that play important biological roles in stress response to violence with HDAC4 (10%), NR4A3 (11%), NR4A2 (12%), DSCAML1(12%), and ELAVL3 (13%) exhibiting higher levels in the low ETV group and DLGAP1 (10%), SHANK2 (10%), and NRG1(11%) having increased methylation in the high ETV group. These findings suggest that individuals subjected to high ETV may be at risk for poor health outcomes that have not been reported previously.
BackgroundCapture, extensive migration, torture, forced labor, and detribalization exerted tremendous stress on the biology of enslaved Africans and severely taxed their abilities to remediate effectively. The likely epigenetic effects were so dramatic as to modify the directionality of ancestral trajectories in the surviving descendants of these Africans. In other words, enslavement in the Americas and its sequelae produced a wide assortment of new and powerful selective pressures on kidnapped and enslaved Africans. Under these conditions, old responses that had been effective in the African context may have been less advantageous and even disadvantageous in the American context. Each step in the enslavement process exerted its unique cluster of effects on the biology of enslaved individuals at specific stages in the lifecycle.Kidnapping and extensive migration within Africa took its toll on targeted individuals and groups; torture and forced labor required new responses to ensure survival. In the Americas, detribalization
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