The offspring of mice that suffered early-life stress show signs of the disturbance their parent experienced, researchers from the University of Zurich and their colleagues have found, pointing to a potential RNA-based mechanism by which trauma may be epigenetically inherited. The team’s work was published today (April 13) in Nature Neuroscience.
Zurich’s Isabelle Mansuy and her collaborators sought to evaluate the environmental and genetic factors behind complex neurological diseases associated with childhood trauma, such as borderline personality disorder. The team used a mouse model of “unpredictable maternal separation combined with unpredictable maternal stress,” or MSUS. The MSUS mothers were separated from their young at different times once daily for two weeks. While the unpredictability of this event traumatized the pups, the mothers, too, were stressed during these separation periods, for instance, by being confined to a narrow tube.
When the MSUS young became adults, the researchers found that they were generally more likely to take risks than control adult mice. The MSUS mice were less hesitant to enter wide-open spaces or brightly lit areas than animals that had not been separated from their mothers, for instance. They also exhibited altered glucose metabolism, implying that early developmental trauma had caused permanent behavioral and metabolic changes.
And those changes were not confined to the once-traumatized adults. When the researchers bred those MSUS mice mated with control animals, they found that the progeny, too, were less risk-averse and showed more signs of depression than control animals. Even the offspring’s offspring exhibited altered glucose metabolism.
“This paradigm induced behavioral changes across generations,” said Mansuy.
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/39695/title/Traces-of-Trauma-in-Sperm-RNA/
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