Proximate causes and consequences of intergenerational influences of salient sensory experience

Abstract

Salient sensory environments experienced by a parental generation can exert intergenerational influences on offspring, including offspring not conceived at the time of the parental experience. While these data provide an exciting new perspective on biological inheritance, questions remain about causes and consequences of intergenerational influences of across parental experiences as diverse as stress exposure, dietary perturbations and sensory experiences. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.We thank the Veterinary and Animal Care staff in the Yerkes Neuroscience Vivarium for animal husbandry.

Paternal adverse childhood experiences: Associations with infant DNA methylation

“…However, when exposed to a different odor, the offspring showed no enhanced responses (Dias & Ressler, 2014). Recently, this research group reproduced this effect with olfactory fear conditioning to a specific odor using extracted sperm RNA (Aoued et al., 2020). Though the specific biological mechanism through which this phenomenon occurs is currently unknown, this and other recent promising animal work demonstrate the possibility of paternal stress affecting offspring mammal biology through changes in sperm microRNA, which may recapitulate DNAm patterns postgamete formation (Chuang & Jones, 2007; Hehar et al., 2017; Mashoodh & Champagne, 2019; Morgan et al., 2019; Rodgers et al., 2013, 2015; Scorza et al., 2019).…”

“…While epigenetic reprogramming of the germline in mammals (Heard & Martienssen, 2014) involves global demethylation and remethylation during embryogenesis (Bogdanović & Lister, 2017), some low levels of DNAm are preserved (Heard & Martienssen, 2014). Additionally, animal work has elucidated paternal effects of trauma exposure and epigenetic patterns that may account for physiological and behavioral outcomes of offspring (Aoued et al., 2020; Dias et al., 2015a; Dias & Ressler, 2014; Feldman et al., 2019; Klengel et al., 2016; Klosin & Lehner, 2016; Rodgers et al., 2015; Ryan & Kuzawa, 2020; Wu & Suzuki, 2006).…”