Developmental Neuroscience and Neurogenetics Program, The Saban Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA, United States.
Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism, Children's Hospital Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States.
Chem Senses. 2024 Jan 1;49. doi: 10.1093/chemse/bjae002.
Evidence for parental environments profoundly influencing the physiology, biology, and neurobiology of future generations has been accumulating in the literature. Recent efforts to understand this phenomenon and its underlying mechanisms have sought to use species like rodents and insects to model multi-generational legacies of parental experiences like stress and nutritional exposures. From these studies, we have come to appreciate that parental exposure to salient environmental experiences impacts the cadence of brain development, hormonal responses to stress, and the expression of genes that govern cellular responses to stress in offspring. Recent studies using chemosensory exposure have emerged as a powerful tool to shed new light on how future generations come to be influenced by environments to which parents are exposed. With a specific focus on studies that have leveraged such use of salient chemosensory experiences, this review synthesizes our current understanding of the concept, causes, and consequences of the inheritance of chemosensory legacies by future generations and how this field of inquiry informs the larger picture of how parental experiences can influence offspring biology.
越来越多的证据表明，父母的环境会深刻影响后代的生理、生物学和神经生物学。为了理解这一现象及其潜在机制，最近的研究试图利用老鼠和昆虫等物种来模拟压力和营养暴露等父母经历的多代遗传。从这些研究中，我们逐渐认识到，父母接触显著的环境体验会影响大脑发育的节奏、对压力的激素反应以及控制细胞对压力反应的基因的表达。最近使用化学感觉暴露的研究已经成为一个有力的工具，可以揭示环境如何影响后代，而这些环境是父母所接触到的。本文特别关注利用这种显著的化学感觉体验的研究，综述了我们目前对未来几代人通过化学感觉遗传继承的概念、原因和后果的理解，以及这一领域的研究如何阐明父母经历如何影响后代生物学的更大图景。
