Grant: Doctoral Research Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Every cell in a person's body contains the same DNA. Yet, clearly there are differences between them. Cells that make up your skin, look and function differently than cells that float through your blood. These differences can be partly explained by many small chemical changes to the DNA that affect how DNA is organized and accessed. These are called epigenetic modifications, and are different for every cell type in the human body. Epigenetics can change over a person's lifetime, when individuals get sick, or are exposed to different environments. Understanding epigenetics is therefore important to better understand and predict health outcomes. My project aims to understand the epigenetics within major cell populations of the human placenta. This is challenging because placental tissue is difficult to obtain and separate into individual cells. However, understanding the epigenetics of placental cells is essential to understand how and why pregnancy complications occur. For example, many pregnancy-related conditions are connected to specific placental cell populations not functioning properly. But until we understand the epigenetics healthy pregnancies, it is difficult to fully understand the impacts of the changes seen in unhealthy ones. Building on this data, a secondary outcome is to create a computational tool to calculate the number of different placental cells in a whole placental sample, without needing to physically separate the cells. Having such a tool will allow researchers to determine which specific cell populations are responsible for the changes that we see a mother's pregnancy. For example, mothers with diabetes often have corresponding placental epigenetic changes. But it is unclear if these changes affect the whole placenta or only a sub population of cells. With our tool, we could determine exactly which cells are responsible, which will help understand the underlying causes of the condition, and to develop diagnostics/treatments.