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Metabolic disorders

Fathers' nutritional legacy

Nature volume 467, pages 922–923 (2010)Cite this article

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A female can develop a diabetes-like disease due to a high fat content in her father's diet before she was conceived. Epigenetic modifications of the father's sperm DNA might underlie this peculiar observation. See Letter p.963

On page 963 of this issue, Ng et al.1 report one of the first observations that a father's diet can affect his daughters' health. When the authors fed male rats a high-fat diet, the outcome was not surprising: the animals' body weight and body fat increased, and they exhibited glucose intolerance and resistance to the hormone insulin. Unexpectedly, however, although these males' daughters did not show altered body weight or body fat, in adulthood they developed a diabetes-like condition of impaired glucose tolerance and insulin secretion. Ng and colleagues also found that the gene-expression profile of the insulin-secreting pancreatic islet cells obtained from the daughters was abnormal, affecting several gene networks and cellular pathways. This indicates that the fathers' high-fat diets altered the development of their sperm, which then promoted an adult-onset disease in the daughters.

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Figure 1: Environmental effects across generations.

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  1. Michael K. Skinner is at the Center for Reproductive Biology, School of Biological Sciences, Washington State University, Pullman, Washington 99164-4236, USA. skinner@wsu.edu ,

    Michael K. Skinner

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  1. Michael K. Skinner
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Skinner, M. Fathers' nutritional legacy. Nature 467, 922–923 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/467922a

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