Dad's diet: smRNA methylation signatures in sperm pass on metabolic disease risk

Abstract

The rapid rise in the incidence of obesity and associated metabolic disorders is a major public health challenge. Moreover, the frequency of disease risk has increased by an order of magnitude within a few decades. Despite our awareness that metabolic disease arises at the interface between genetic susceptibility and environmental factors (such as overnutrition and inactivity), we have not been able to curb the incidence of these disorders. With the advent of cost-effective whole-genome sequencing technologies has come the search for the genetic underpinnings of metabolic disorders; however, to date, only a small percentage of metabolic disease risk has been associated with genetic variants. This weak association with genetic variants has raised the intriguing possibility that metabolic disease risk could be transmitted from generation to generation via potentially modifiable non-genetic signals present in parental germ cells.