Grant: CIHR Fellowship

The goal of my research is to discover the impact of parental exposures to diet and environmental factors on their offspring. I measure the impact by examining epigenetic marks which control gene expression. Folic acid has important roles in epigenetics. It was added to flour in North America in the 1990s to prevent birth defects in newborns. High dose folic acid is used in women at risk for pregnancy complications and in men presenting with infertility. However, the possible adverse effects of high dose folic acid on the epigenome of parents and their children have never been tested. We showed in human, for the first time, that high dose folic acid may alter the epigenome of infertile men especially when they carry a variant in a gene called MTHFR. In this project, we continue our study by examining the mechanism of the effects of high dose folic acid on the epigenome and the risks for the offspring in human as well as mouse models. Since the MTHFR variant is frequent and found in 10-12% of Canadians, we will compare the sperm epigenomes of men with and without the variant. We will also determine if there are epigenomic alterations in the placentas of pregnant women treated with high dose folic acid (4-5 mg/day) as compared to those treated with low dose folic acid (<1 mg/day) . Novel next generation sequencing methods will be used in this project to screen millions of sites in the whole genome. We aim to clarify whether preventing pregnancy complications or treatment of male infertility with high dose folic acid is safe for Canadian women and men and also for their children.