Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT: Therian mammals and angiosperms evolved genomic imprinting in nutritive tissues, the placenta and endosperm, where maternal and paternal genomes are in conflict with respect to resource allocation. In imprinted genes, transcription is repressed from either the paternal or the maternal allele, resulting in allele specific expression (ASE). We studied variation in ASE of imprinted genes in human placentas to detect loss of imprinting (LOI), which refers to departures from mono-allelic expression. The placental tissue was collected in connection with a multigenerational, prospective cohort study in Mali, West Africa, in which individuals were followed from infancy and early childhood to adulthood (age 18+ years). When young women for whom we had longitudinal growth data gave birth, we collected placental tissue and umbilical cord tissue. We genotyped the umbilical cord tissue and saliva samples from parents using targeted DNAseq to identify SNPs in 96 genes known from the literature to be imprinted in human placentas. We used RNAseq to analyze allele specific expression of the heterozygous SNPs. Our results provide the first systematic analysis of variation in LOI across genes and individuals and make it possible to test the hypothesis that modulation of imprinting is an epigenetic mechanism that contributes to the regulation of offspring growth.
REPOSITORIES: dbGaP
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