Update 1B: Transgenerational environmental effects
Environmental diesel exposure on offspring
Anne Couturier-Tarrade, Senior Scientist, INRAE-UMR1198 BREED, France
Anne Couturier-Tarrade is a senior scientist at BREED Unit (Biology of Reproduction, Epigenetic, Environment and Development) from INRAE, a research unit focusing on reproduction and DOHaD (Developmental Origins of Health and Disease). She is at the head of PEPPS team (Placenta, Environment and Programming of PhenotypeS). She has been working in the field of DOHaD for over ten years now, focusing on the effects of maternal environment (nutrition, metabolism, pollution and nanoparticles) on the placenta, a programming agent of offspring phenotype. She has acquired a strong expertise on several animal models including rabbit and mouse, but also on human placenta during her PhD.
She is a member of the board of DOHaD (http://sf-dohad.fr) and EPG (http://europeanplacenta.com). Currently, she is the coordinator of two research programs related to placental function (ANR and INRAE).
Understanding the long-term reproductive and metabolic effects of developmental exposure to low level chemical mixtures using sheep exposed to biosolids treated pasture
Dr Michelle Bellingham, Senior Lecturer, Glasgow University, UK
Michelle Bellingham is a senior lecturer in comparative physiology at the School of Biodiversity, One Health and Veterinary Medicine at the University of Glasgow. Her research for the past 15 years has focused on understanding the long-term health effects of exposure to environmental chemical mixtures, where she has published widely on the physiological effects on sheep exposed to chemical mixtures during development as a result of maternal grazing on biosolids-treated agricultural land.
Transgenerational effects of stress
Assistant Professor Katharina Gapp, Professor, Institute for Neuroscience, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Presentation learning objectives:
- Mouse sperm acquires a range of epigenetic changes in response to various forms of stress.
- These changes include alterations in small RNAs, circRNAs, and chromatin accessibility.
- These changes are associated with phenotypic alterations in the offspring.
- Some but not all alterations of the sperm non-genetic repertoire are sufficient to elicit said phenotype when introduced in the offspring.
Katharina Gapp is an assistant professor at the Institute for Neuroscience at ETH Zürich, Switzerland. She has spent the last 12 years studying the impact of paternal stress on offspring phenotype and the mechanisms that mediated non-genetic information transfer across generations. Her early work during her PhD in the lab of Isabelle Mansuy at the Brain research institute of ETH Zürich identified sperm RNA as a crucial vector of the behavioral and metabolic effects of early life stress across generations in mice and sparked a new field of RNA mediated inheritance of environmentally triggered traits in mammals. Katharina`s studies have been published in a range of prestigious journals. Her work has been acknowledged with the prestigious PRIMA (Swiss national Science foundation) and ERC starting grant (now to be funded by Switzerland). While Katharina´s past research during her post doc at Cambridge University and Sanger Institute UK still focused on non-coding RNAs, the current work of her team has a particular focus on nuclear receptors and the development of novel translational tools to interfere with their function.