Project description:To investigate the potential deleterious impact of chronic stress at molecular level in the progeny, we exposed zebrafish males to an unpredictable chronic stress protocol during 21 days
Project description:To investigate the potential deleterious impact of chronic stress at molecular level in testicular tissue, we exposed zebrafish males to chronic stress during 21 days, covering around three complete cycles of spermatogenesis in the species
Project description:This dataset describe the transcriptomic profiling of adult brain, gonades (testis and ovaries) of adult zebrafish exposed to 20µg/L of depleted uranium for 10 days. The progeny of the exposed fishes were also analysed at two-cells stage and 96 hours post fertilization
Project description:Environmental challenges experienced by an organism can have multiple effects at an individual level, with recent work also suggesting these challenges may affect their unexposed offspring. In a time of rapid environmental change, understanding whether environmental challenges experienced by organisms could increase the fitness of future generations to survive these same stressors, is critically needed. Low dissolved oxygen is a common environmental challenge that aquatic organisms encounter, resulting in numerous physiological, phenotypic, and epigenetic changes. In this study, we use zebrafish (Danio rerio) as a model to investigate how paternal hypoxia experience impacts subsequent progeny. Males were exposed to moderate hypoxia (11-13 kPA) for 2 weeks, bred to create an F1 generation, and progeny underwent an acute hypoxia (0-1 kPA) tolerance assay. Using time to loss of equilibrium and loss of equilibrium frequency as measured of hypoxia resistance, we show that paternal exposure to hypoxia endow offspring with a greater tolerance to acute hypoxia, compared to offspring of unexposed males, though there are strong family x treatment effects. In addition to phenotypic alternations, we also investigated changes in gene expression in offspring. We conducted RNA-Seq on whole fry and detected 91 differentially expressed genes, including two hemoglobin genes that are significantly upregulated by more than 4-fold in the offspring of hypoxia exposed males. Moreover, the offspring which maintained equilibrium the longest showed the greatest upregulation in hemoglobin expression. Paternal exposures to physiological challenges are thus able to impact the phenotype and gene expression of their unexposed progeny. We conducted whole genome bisulfite sequencing (WGBS) on the sperm of parental males to assess whether changes in progeny phenotype and gene expression are underpinned by changes in DNA methylation. While we observed coupling of methylation levels in the parental sperm and gene expression in progeny overall, we did not detect differential methylation at any of the differentially expressed genes, suggesting that another epigenetic mechanism is responsible for the observed changes in gene expression. Overall, our findings suggest that a ‘memory’ of past hypoxia exposure is maintained and that this environmentally induced information is transferred to subsequent generations, pre-acclimating progeny to cope with hypoxic conditions.
Project description:Paternal nicotine exposure can alter phenotypes in future generations. To explore whether paternal nicotine exposure affects the hepatic repair to chronic injury which would lead to hepatic fibrosis in offspring, we establish a paternal effect model based on nicotine exposure in mice.
Project description:The increasing global burden of metabolic disorders including obesity and diabetes necessitates a comprehensive understanding of their etiology, which not only encompasses genetic and environmental factors but also parental influence. Recent evidence has unveiled paternal obesity as a contributing factor to offspring's metabolic health via sperm epigenetic modifications. In this study, we investigated the impact of a Western diet-induced obesity in C57BL/6 male mice on sperm chromatin accessibility and the subsequent metabolic health of their progeny. Utilizing Assay for Transposase-Accessible Chromatin with sequencing, we discovered 450 regions with differential accessibility in sperm from obese fathers, implicating key developmental and metabolic pathways. Contrary to expectations, these epigenetic alterations in sperm were not predictive of long-term metabolic disorders in offspring, who exhibited only mild transient metabolic changes early in life. Both male and female F1 progeny showed no enduring predisposition to obesity or diabetes. These results underscore the biological resilience of offspring to paternal epigenetic inheritance, suggesting a complex interplay between inherited epigenetic modifications and the offspring's own developmental compensatory mechanisms. This study calls for further research into the biological processes that confer this resilience, which could inform interventional strategies to combat the heritability of metabolic diseases.
Project description:Transgenerational effects of parental metabolic state have been shown, but the mechanism is still unclear. Here we present transcriptome sequencing data from the F2 progeny of obese maternal or paternal grandfathers compared to genetically matched wild-type controls
Project description:Adolescent stress can impact health and well-being not only during adulthood of the exposed individual but even in future generations. To begin to unravel the molecular mechanisms underlying these long-term effects, we determined if stress administered to males during adolescence (F0) altered anxiety behaviors and gene expression profiles in the amygdala – a critical region in the control of emotional states – of their progeny in two generations (F1, F2). Male C57BL/6 mice underwent chronic unpredictable stress (CUS) for two-weeks during adolescence and were used to produce two generations of offspring. Male and female F1 and F2 animals were tested in behavioral assays to measure affective behavior and stress reactivity. Remarkably, transgenerational inheritance of paternal stress exposure produced a protective phenotype in the male, but not the female lineage. In behaviorally naïve mice (n = 5), mRNA from the amygdala was sequenced to determine the total transcriptomes and pathway analysis was employed to identify differentially expressed genes of functional interest. RNA-Seq analysis of the amygdala from F1 and F2 male offspring identified genes with altered expression in mice derived from fathers exposed to CUS. Among the differentially expressed pathway was ‘notch signaling’, which was significantly altered in F2 males. Therefore, we show that paternal stress exposure impacts future generations which manifest in behavioral changes and molecular adaptations.