Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

This research is aimed at understanding how sex-specific developmental programming events (DNA methylation) occurring in the prenatal and early postnatal periods can be associated with adult disease and transgenerational effects. It is based on the increased interest in how the genes we inherit from our parents are influenced by diet, the environment and the experiences we encounter during prenatal life and early childhood. These early events are particularly important as a number of common diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer and neurobehavioural disorders can originate in very early life, a phenomenon referred to as Developmental Origins of Adult Health and Disease. A better understanding is currently needed of how and when (susceptibility windows) DNA methylation abnormalities occur in fetal male germs cells, since DNA methylation is only affected prenatally in male germ cells whereas the DNA of female germ cells doesn't become methylated until after birth and following puberty. We will test how perturbations of a key enzyme in the folate pathway, methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR), and/or folate deficiency affect male germ cell DNA methylation patterns in the mouse. We hypothesize that male fetal germ cells are uniquely vulnerable to DNA methylation abnormalities resulting from environmental insults occurring during pregnancy.