The results of our current study demonstrate that germline exposure to THC leads to significant gene expression abnormalities in both male and female F1 offspring, with different profiles noted in the magnitude of the disturbances between the sexes. Parental THC exposure was associated with altered mRNA expression of genes functionally implicated in the regulation of synaptic plasticity in the striatum, in line with the results of our previous work that only investigated male offspring (Szutorisz et al., 2014) or did not address sex-specific differences (Watson et al., 2015). Here, a key finding was the identification of alterations in the mRNA levels of a number of genes encoding regulators of glutamatergic synaptic plasticity in females and the relationships between different genes depending on sex. Moreover, the observed THC effects on the genes studied were more prevalent in the dorsal striatal subregion in adulthood in contrast to adolescence during which alterations were more evident in the ventral striatum.
