Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences fed male mice a high-fat diet and found changes in small RNA fragments carried in their sperm, fragments short enough to have been dismissed as noise.
The team isolated those altered sperm RNA fragments and injected them alone, with no other sperm material, into normal fertilized mouse eggs. The resulting offspring developed metabolic problems resembling those of the high-fat-fed males, unrelated to DNA methylation at the sites tested.
The fragments altered gene activity in the offspring's early embryos and in the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas, pointing to small RNA, not DNA marking, as the carrier of this particular paternal effect. It remains a mouse finding; whether human sperm carries an equivalent signal from a father's diet has not been shown.
Read the original study
Chen et al., Science, 2016 · doi.org/10.1126/science.aad7977
A diet's effects rode along in sperm RNA.
Source
- Chen, Q., Yan, M., Cao, Z., Li, X., Zhang, Y., Shi, J., Feng, G.-h., Peng, H., Zhang, X., Zhang, Y., Qian, J., Duan, E., Zhai, Q., & Zhou, Q. (2016). Sperm tsRNAs contribute to intergenerational inheritance of an acquired metabolic disorder. Science, 351(6271), 397–400. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aad7977