Chunk #83 — Future Directions: Combining Stress and Alcohol Models and Assessment of Multigenerational Effects and Therapeutics — Multigenerational Effects
to that of F1 males (Franklin et al., 2010). Multigenerational transmission of epigenetic marks have also been found with prenatal stress (Ward et al., 2013), postnatal stress (Roth et al., 2009a), and preconception stress of both the mother (Zaidan et al., 2013) and father (Mychasiuk et al., 2013). Paternal stress has likewise been demonstrated to have implications for the behavior and epigenome of offspring (Rando, 2012). Males exposed to preconception stress had offspring with impaired learning on a motor coordination task alongside altered levels of global methylation in the frontal cortex and hippocampus (Mychasiuk et al., 2013). Additionally, sperm miRNAs have been suggested as a mechanism of multigenerational epigenetic programming, as sperm miRNA levels are altered following stress and microinjection of these miRNAs into zygotes causes dysregulation of gene expression related to the HPA axis (Rodgers et al., 2013; Rodgers et al., 2015). It is worth noting that the concept of epigenetic transgenerational transmission is controversial, and some argue that alterations in maternal behavior due to the fitness of the offspring or mating patterns of the male could explain the perpetuation of epigenetic marks across generations rather than germline transmission (Whitelaw, 2015). Future work is needed to parse apart the
