Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

There is increasing evidence that parents' diet or environmental exposures not only affects their own health but may predispose their offspring to different diseases. The goal of this research project is to identify how parental exposures may adversely affect their offspring's epigenetic marks which control the expression of different genes in the body. High dose folic acid is commonly used in men presenting with infertility. However, it has never been tested whether or not folic acid supplements can affect the epigenome of parents and their offspring. Our data from human and mouse models for the first time shows that supplementation with high dose folic acid alters the global methylation status of sperm DNA. Such alterations, detected by state-of-the-art next generation sequencing methods, may predispose the offspring of folic acid recipients to diseases such as cancer and developmental disorders.