In Their Earliest Days, Embryos Record Their Environments

Prentice and Waterland decided to blend their interests in metastable epialleles and early-life nutrition. Using blood samples from 25 Gambian children born in the rainy and dry seasons during the 1990s, Prentice, Waterland, and colleagues examined methylation patterns at five sites in the genome thought to be metastable epialleles based on a separate genomic screen they had done in Caucasian adults. The researchers began probing the human genome to identify more metastable epialleles. In 2015, they pinned down a tumor suppressor, VTRNA2-1, the methylation of which is tied to season of conception; a year later, they showed the same for POMC, a gene whose methylation patterns are related to an individual's body mass index.