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Fat eggs shape offspring health

Nature Genetics volume 48, pages 478–479 (2016)Cite this article

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How maternal diet influences offspring metabolism is unclear, as it is difficult to distinguish between the effects of the in utero environment and epigenetic factors contributed by the oocyte. In a mouse model of high-fat diet, a new study teases apart these mechanisms by using in vitro fertilization and shows that susceptibility of offspring to metabolic disorder can likely be attributed to epigenetic inheritance via the oocyte.

Mounting evidence suggests that the metabolic status of parents can lead to greater susceptibility to metabolic disease in their offspring. While the worldwide prevalence of obesity and type 2 diabetes seem to be ever increasing in the human population, there is a growing need to understand whether and how parental diet alters the health of the next generation. Studies on the paternal effects of diet feature more prominently in the literature, the most recent of which demonstrate that malnourishment of male mice affects the expression of noncoding RNA in sperm1,2,3. This alone is sufficient to disrupt gene expression and metabolism in offspring. Sperm DNA methylation patterns are also affected by diet4, although matching differentially methylated regions in sperm with metabolic phenotypes in offspring can be challenging. Considerably more complications arise when studying the effects of maternal diet on the susceptibility of offspring to metabolic disruption, and, therefore, less is known. This is because it is difficult to separate the effects of physiology during pregnancy from altered epigenetic factors in the oocyte. In this issue, Johannes Beckers, Martin Hrabě de Angelis and colleagues5 address this problem by using a mouse model of high-fat diet (HFD) together with in vitro fertilization (IVF) to directly show that maternal diet triggers defect(s) in the oocyte, which program metabolic disease in the offspring.

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Figure 1: Potential epigenetic factors transmitted by oocytes.

Kim Caesar/Nature Publishing Group

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  1. Erica D. Watson and Joanna Rakoczy are in the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.,

    Erica D Watson & Joanna Rakoczy

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  1. Erica D Watson
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  2. Joanna Rakoczy
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Correspondence to Erica D Watson.

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Watson, E., Rakoczy, J. Fat eggs shape offspring health. Nat Genet 48, 478–479 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3554

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