German researchers from Technical University of Munich in collaboration with researchers at Helmholtz Zentrum München and the German Center for Diabetes Research (DZD) have shown that diet-induced obesity and diabetes can be epigenetically inherited by the offspring via both oocytes and sperm, according to a study recently published in Nature Genetics.
Professor Johannes Beckers and his team at the Institute of Experimental Genetics (IEG) used mice that had become obese and had developed type 2 diabetes due to a high-fat diet. Their offspring were obtained solely through in vitro fertilization (IVF) from isolated oocytes and sperm, so that changes in the offspring could only be passed on via these cells. The offspring were carried and born by healthy surrogate mothers. This enabled the researchers to rule out additional factors such as the behavior of the parents and influences of the mother during pregnancy and lactation.
“The results showed that both oocytes and sperm passed on epigenetic information, which particularly in the female offspring led to severe obesity,” says Beckers, who directed the study. In the male offspring, by contrast, the blood glucose level was more affected than in the female siblings. The data also show that – like in humans – the maternal contribution to the change in metabolism in the offspring is greater than the paternal contribution.
“This kind of epigenetic inheritance of a metabolic disorder due to an unhealthy diet could be another major cause for the dramatic global increase in the prevalence of diabetes since the 1960s,” said Prof. Martin Hrabě de Angelis, chair for Experimental Genetics at TUM. The increase in diabetic patients observed throughout the world can hardly be explained by mutations in the genes themselves (DNA) because the increase has been too fast. Since epigenetic inheritance – as opposed to genetic inheritance – is in principle reversible, new possibilities to influence the development of obesity and diabetes arise from these observations, according to the scientists.
“From the perspective of basic research, this study is so important because it proves for the first time that an acquired metabolic disorder can be passed on epigenetically to the offspring via oocytes and sperm– similar to the ideas of Lamarck and Darwin,” Beckers says.
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