Grant: Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship Program

Research in animals and humans has linked maternal prenatal stressors to longitudinal mental health outcomes in offspring, suggesting that the in utero environment affects fetal development. One of the earliest behavioral markers of prenatal stress exposure in infants is negative emotionality, a temperamental indicator of heightened stress reactivity, characterized by irritability, sadness and fussiness. Although it is appreciated by developmental psychologists that temperament, and its underlying biological components, are shaped by the interplay of genetics, experience, and normal processes of maturation, research is highly lacking that actually demonstrates how the environment becomes biologically embedded in relation to child temperament. An intriguing, nascent area of research in child development has identified an epigenetic marker in children, in the form of DNA methylation, informative of the developmental history of the interplay of biology and environment. DNA methylation can act upon the genome to guide the expression of genes into biological material and is proposed to be involved in the biological embedding of salient environmental exposures, including prenatal factors. In this proposal, I test the hypothesis that DNA methylation patterns bridge the link between prenatal stress exposure and infant negative emotionality at 6 months of age.