Here’s How Stressed Dads affect their Child’s Brain Development
It has been established by scientific research that maternal stress has a significant impact on the child’s brain development. But what about paternal stress? In a ground-breaking research, scientists showed how stress experienced by a male affects his sperm in such a way that it affects his offspring’s response to stress.
The study provides important clues on understanding how a father’s life experiences may affect his children’s brain development and mental health through a purely biological and not behavioural means
"It’s remarkable to me that seemingly mild stress to a male mouse would trigger this massive change in microRNA response and that that would get wired into the course of his offspring’s development," says Tracy L. Bale - lead author of the study and professor of neuroscience in Penn’s School of Veterinary Medicine and Perelman School of Medicine.
After comparing sperm from the stressed fathers to their unstressed counterparts, the research team found increased expression of nine miRs in the stressed animals. Unlike some other types of RNA, miRs do not code for a protein; instead, they serve to silence or degrade specific messenger RNAs, preventing them from being translated into proteins
Bale and her colleagues wanted to know whether there is a causal relationship in their initial findings. To do this, they microinjected the nine miRs into mouse zygotes, which were then implanted into normal female mice who carried them as surrogates. They also included control groups in which zygotes received either a sham injection or an injection of a single miR. When the offspring became adults, the researchers examined their response to stress.
They found that when subjected to a mild stress, in this case, being restrained briefly, the offspring that arose from the zygotes that received the multi-miR injections had lower cortisone levels compared to offspring in the control groups. The mice in the multi-miR injection group also showed significant changes in the expression of hundreds of genes in the paraventricular nucleus, a brain region involved in directing stress regulation, suggesting wide-spread changes in early neurodevelopment. Bale suspects that these miRs may be incorporated into the maturing sperm and influence development at fertilisation.
Their study suggests that addressing stress, instead of ignoring it, may help prevent an abnormal stress response from passing on to the next generation.
The new findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.
Source of this article:
Transgenerational epigenetic programming via sperm microRNA recapitulates effects of paternal stress, PNAS
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