Division of Child Health, Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK.
Adv Exp Med Biol. 2019;1200:71-89. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-23633-5_4.
The ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions is critical for any species to survive. Many environmental changes occur too rapidly for an organism's genome to adapt in time. Accordingly, being able to modify either its own phenotype, or the phenotype of its offspring to better suit future anticipated environmental conditions could afford an organism a significant advantage. However, a range of animal models and human epidemiological data sets are now showing that environmental factors such as changes in the quality or quantity of an individual's diet, temperature, stress or exposure to pollutants can all adversely affect the quality of parental gametes, the development of the preimplantation embryo and the health and wellbeing of offspring over multiple generations. This chapter will examine transgenerational effects of both maternal and paternal environmental factors on offspring development and wellbeing in both human and animal model studies. Changes in the epigenetic status of either parental or grand-parental gametes provide one candidate mechanism through which the impacts of environmental experience can be passed from one generation to another. This chapter will therefore also focus on the impact of parental and grand-parental diet on epigenetic transgenerational inheritance and offspring phenotype.
适应不断变化的环境条件的能力对任何物种的生存都是至关重要的。许多环境变化发生得太快，以至于生物体的基因组无法及时适应。因此，能够改变自身表型或后代的表型，以更好地适应未来预期的环境条件，可能会使生物体获得显著优势。然而，一系列动物模型和人类流行病学数据集现在表明，饮食质量或数量的变化、温度变化、压力或暴露于污染物等环境因素都会对亲代配子的质量、胚胎着床前的发育以及后代在多代中的健康和福祉产生不利影响。本章将检查母体和父体环境因素对人类和动物模型研究中后代发育和健康的跨代影响。无论是亲代还是隔代配子的表观遗传状态的变化，都为环境经验的影响可以从一代传递到另一代的一种候选机制提供了依据。因此，本章还将重点关注父母和隔代父母的饮食对表观遗传跨代遗传和后代表型的影响。
