A startling new study from McGill University suggests that a father’s diet before conception plays a major role in fetus development and the offspring’s future predisposition to disease. The researchers say that significant alterations to the sperm epigenome triggered by diet and lifestyle choices should raise serious concerns about the long-term effects of current Western […]
A dad’s exposure to stress leaves a lasting impression on his sperm, say researchers who have been investigating a never-before-seenepigenetic link to diseases such as anxiety and depression that can be passed from father to child. The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, shows that stress on pre-adolescent and adult male mice induced an […]
Epigenetics – how gene expression is regulated by temporary switches, called epi-marks – appears to be a critical and overlooked factor in the long-standing evolutionary puzzle of why homosexuality occurs. That’s according to a study published in The Quarterly Review of Biology that provides evidence that sex-specific epi-marks can lead to homosexuality when they are […]
Male pseudoscorpions treated with tetracycline suffer significantly reduced sperm viability and this toxic effect is passed on to their untreated sons, say University of Nevada researchers who believe a similar effect could occur in humans. Tetracycline is commonly used as an additive in animal feed and also as an antimicrobial therapy in developing countries. Researcher […]
Adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine – the A,T,G and C that make up the DNA code. But these 4 letters are not the whole story. The rise of epigenetics in the past decade has drawn attention to a fifth nucleotide, 5-methylcytosine (5-mC), that sometimes replaces cytosine in the famous DNA double helix to regulate which […]
Researchers from the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center have discovered a vast new class of previously unrecognized mammalian genes that do not encode proteins, but instead function as long RNA molecules. The findings, appearing in the journal Nature, show that these “large intervening non-coding RNAs” (lincRNAs) play critical […]
Epigenetic changes (inherited changes in gene regulation that occur without a change in DNA sequence) caused by a common fruit fungicide (Vinclozolin) are dramatically affecting the mating behavior of rats, say researchers from the University of Texas at Austin. They found that female rats avoid males whose great-grandfathers were exposed to the fungicide, preferring instead […]
