The quality of maternal care in rodents has a widespread impact on phenotype that persists into adulthood, providing a model to study epigenetic mechanisms mediating the impact of the early life social environment on health later in life [6]. In this study, we asked whether our traditional approach examining the regulatory elements of candidate genes reflects the totality of the epigenetic response to naturally occurring environmental stimuli. By extending our analysis beyond the predicted boundaries of the NR3C1 gene using high-density coverage of megabases of sequence, we investigated whether changes are limited to a small number of candidate genes, whether the changes are limited to 5′ regulatory regions and whether they are exclusive to regions encoding mRNAs.
