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Capturing Functional Epigenomes For Insight Into Metabolic Diseases., Fiona Allum, Elin Grundberg

Manuscripts, Articles, Book Chapters and Other Papers

BACKGROUND: Metabolic diseases such as obesity are known to be driven by both environmental and genetic factors. Although genome-wide association studies of common variants and their impact on complex traits have provided some biological insight into disease etiology, identified genetic variants have been found to contribute only a small proportion to disease heritability, and to map mainly to non-coding regions of the genome. To link variants to function, association studies of cellular traits, such as epigenetic marks, in disease-relevant tissues are commonly applied.

SCOPE OF THE REVIEW: We review large-scale efforts to generate genome-wide maps of coordinated epigenetic marks and …

Adverse Maternal Environment And Western Diet Impairs Cognitive Function And Alters Hippocampal Glucocorticoid Receptor Promoter Methylation In Male Mice., Xingrao Ke, Qi Fu, Jennifer Sterrett, Cecilia J. Hillard, Robert H. Lane, Amber Majnik

Manuscripts, Articles, Book Chapters and Other Papers

Adverse maternal environment (AME) and high-fat diet in early childhood increase the risk of cognitive impairment and depression later in life. Cognitive impairment associates with hippocampal dysfunction. A key regulator of hippocampal function is the glucocorticoid receptor. Increased hippocampal GR expression associates with cognitive impairment and depression. Transcriptional control of GR relies in part upon the DNA methylation status at multiple alternative initiation sites that are tissue specific, with exon 1.7 being hippocampal specific. Increased exon 1.7 expression associates with upregulated hippocampal GR expression in early life stress animal models. However, the effects of AME combined with postweaning western diet …