Excel · study · 2026
Paternal early-life stress and diet influence female offspring behavior through sperm DNA methylation and transcriptomic alterations in the Amygdala [Sperm_methylation_F0]
Listed in NCBI GEO
Obesity is a global epidemic influenced by stress-related experiences during development, which can program behavioral traits, with the amygdala playing a central role in stress regulation.
Description
These programmed effects may be inherited through epigenetic mechanisms. Here, we examined the impact of paternal early-life stress (ELS), alone or combined with a high-fat diet (HFD), on offspring behavior and gene regulation.
Male Wistar rats underwent maternal separation to induce ELS, followed by elevated plus maze (EPM) testing and exposure to either HFD or standard chow. These males were bred with naïve females, and F1 offspring were raised under standard conditions. Amygdala tissue and sperm were collected; RNA from paternal and offspring amygdalae was deep-sequenced, and sperm DNA was analyzed using Reduced Representation Bisulfite Deep Sequencing (RRBS.
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Paternal exposure to ELS and HFD independently and jointly altered physiology and behavior in F1 female offspring. Offspring of ELS fathers showed increased exploratory behavior and mobility in the EPM, while; paternal HFD increased time spent in open arms. In the paternal amygdala, ELS and HFD induced distinct gene expression changes.
Sperm methylation analysis revealed hundreds of differentially methylated genes, many overlapping with transcriptional changes in the F1 female amygdala, supporting a role for epigenetic inheritance. Overlapping expression patterns in F0 and F1 included genes involved in dopamine signaling and epigenetic regulation. Notably, the imprinted gene GRB10 showed increased promoter methylation in sperm and reduced expression in both paternal and offspring amygdala, validated by immunostaining.
These findings suggest that paternal ELS and HFD shape offspring phenotype through heritable epigenetic modifications.
Links
Get the data
- GEO FTP directory ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/series/GSE306nnn/GSE306044 ↗
download · from NCBI GEO
Where it is published
- GEO accession page ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/query/acc.cgi?acc=GSE306044 ↗
landing page · from NCBI GEO
Documentation and papers
- PRJNA1309010 ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bioproject/PRJNA1309010 ↗
project · from NCBI GEO
Topics
- Stated by source
- Methylation profiling by high throughput sequencing · Rattus norvegicus
- From keywords
- Life Sciences
- Inferred from text
- Sequencing 75%
Provenance · 1 source records, 8 field assertions
| Source | Key | Last seen | Raw |
|---|---|---|---|
| NCBI GEO | GSE306044 | 12 d ago | JSON v1 |
| Field | Assertion | Extractor | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| access_level | source · NCBI GEO | connector:ncbi_geo@1.0.0 | |
| concepts[field].local:field:life-sciences | mapping · NCBI GEO | connector:ncbi_geo@1.0.0 | |
| concepts[method].geo_series_type:methylation-profiling-by-high-throughput-sequencing | source · NCBI GEO | connector:ncbi_geo@1.0.0 | /gdstype |
| concepts[modality].local:modality:sequencing | enrichment · NCBI GEO | keyword-concept-rules@1.0.0 | title+description (75%) |
| concepts[organism].NCBITaxon:10116 | source · NCBI GEO | connector:ncbi_geo@1.0.0 | /taxon |
| description | source · NCBI GEO | connector:ncbi_geo@1.0.0 | /summary |
| publication_date | source · NCBI GEO | connector:ncbi_geo@1.0.0 | |
| title | source · NCBI GEO | connector:ncbi_geo@1.0.0 | /title |