scholarly journals Intergenerational Effects of Early-Life Advantage: Lessons from a Primate Study

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Dettmer ◽  
James Heckman ◽  
Juan Pantano ◽  
Victor Ronda ◽  
Stephen Suomi
Keyword(s):  
Early Life ◽  
Intergenerational Effects

scholarly journals Title: Intergenerational effects of early adversity on survival in wild baboons

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew N. Zipple ◽  
Elizabeth A. Archie ◽  
Jenny Tung ◽  
Jeanne Altmann ◽  
Susan C. Alberts
Keyword(s):  
Early Life ◽  
Early Adversity ◽  
Offspring Survival ◽  
Intergenerational Effects ◽  
Offspring Quality ◽  
Parental Effect ◽  
Early Life Adversity ◽  
Prospective Longitudinal ◽  
Wild Baboons

AbstractIn humans and nonhuman animals, early life adversity can affect an individual’s health, survival, and fertility for many years after the adverse experience. However, whether early life adversity also imposes intergenerational effects on the exposed individual’s offspring is not well understood. Here, we fill this gap by leveraging prospective, longitudinal data on a wild, long-lived primate. We find that juveniles whose mothers experienced early life adversity exhibit high mortality before age 4, and this effect is independent of the juvenile’s own experience of early adversity. Furthermore, our results point towards a strong role for classic parental effects in driving these effects: mothers that experienced early life adversity displayed reduced viability in adulthood, which in turn led to reductions in offspring survival. Importantly, these mothers’ juvenile offspring often preceded them in death by 1 to 2 years, indicating that, for high adversity mothers, the quality of maternal care declines near the end of life. While we cannot exclude direct effects of a parent’s environment on offspring quality (e.g., transgenerational epigenetic changes), our results are most consistent with a classic parental effect, in which the environment experienced by a parent affects its future phenotype and therefore its offspring’s phenotype. Together, our findings demonstrate that adversity experienced by individuals in one generation can have strong effects on the survival of offspring in the next generation, even if those offspring did not themselves experience early adversity.

Intergenerational effects of maternal early life adversity on infant DNA methylation of NR3C1

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (9) ◽  
pp. 656
Author(s):  
Katherine Bowers ◽  
Hong Ji ◽  
Lili Ding ◽  
Robert Ammerman ◽  
Judith Van Ginkel ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Dna Methylation ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Intergenerational Effects ◽  
Early Life Adversity

scholarly journals Intergenerational Effects of Early Life Starvation on Life-History, Consumption, and Transcriptome of a Holometabolous Insect

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Catherine Paul ◽  
Pragya Singh ◽  
Alice B. Dennis ◽  
Caroline Müller
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Life History Traits ◽  
Life Stage ◽  
Food Limitation ◽  
Parental Effects ◽  
Intergenerational Effects ◽  
Holometabolous Insect ◽  
Parental Phenotype ◽  
Starvation Conditions

ABSTRACTIntergenerational effects, also known as parental effects in which the offspring phenotype is influenced by the parental phenotype, can occur in response to parental early life food-limitation and adult reproductive environment. However, little is known about how these parental life stage-specific environments interact with each other and with the offspring environment to influence offspring phenotype, particularly in organisms that realize distinct niches across ontogeny. We examined the effects of parental early life starvation and adult reproductive environment on offspring traits under matching or mismatching offspring early life starvation conditions using the holometabolous, haplo-diploid insect Athalia rosae (turnip sawfly). We show that the parental early life starvation treatment had context-dependent intergenerational effects on the life-history and consumption traits of offspring larvae, partly in interaction with offspring conditions and sex, while there was no significant effect of parental adult reproductive environment. In addition, while offspring larval starvation led to numerous gene- and pathway-level expression differences, parental starvation impacted fewer genes and only the ribosomal pathway. Our findings reveal that parental starvation evokes complex intergenerational effects on offspring life-history traits, consumption patterns as well as gene expression, although the effects are less pronounced than those of offspring starvation.

scholarly journals Effects of early life adversity on maternal effort and glucocorticoids in wild olive baboons

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam K Patterson ◽  
Katie Hinde ◽  
Angela B Bond ◽  
Benjamin C Trumble ◽  
Shirley C Strum ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Early Life ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Social Rank ◽  
Epigenetic Inheritance ◽  
Papio Cynocephalus ◽  
Papio Anubis ◽  
Intergenerational Effects ◽  
Early Life Adversity ◽  
Olive Baboons ◽  
Maternal Effort

Adverse experiences during early life exert important effects on development, health, reproduction, and social bonds, with consequences often persisting across generations. A mother's early life experiences can impact her offspring's development through a number of pathways, such as maternal care, physiological signaling through glucocorticoids, or even intergenerational effects like epigenetic inheritance. Early life adversity in female yellow baboons (Papio cynocephalus) predicts elevated glucocorticoids, reduced sociality, shortened lifespan, and higher offspring mortality. If baboon mothers with more early life adversity, experience poorer condition and struggle to provide for their offspring, this could contribute to the persisting transgenerational effects of adversity. Here, we examined the effects of mothers' early life adversity on their maternal effort, physiology, and offspring survivability in a population of olive baboons, Papio anubis. Mothers who experienced more adversity in their own early development exerted greater maternal effort (i.e., spent more time nursing and carrying) and had higher glucocorticoid metabolites than mothers with less early life adversity. Offspring of mothers with more early life adversity had reduced survivability compared to offspring of mothers with less early life adversity. There was no evidence that high maternal social rank buffered against the effects of early life adversity. Our data suggest early life experiences can have lasting consequences on maternal effort and physiology, which may function as proximate mechanisms for intergenerational effects of maternal experience.

scholarly journals Intergenerational effects of maternal birth season on offspring size in rural Gambia

2012 ◽  
Vol 279 (1745) ◽  
pp. 4253-4262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian J. Rickard ◽  
Alexandre Courtiol ◽  
Andrew M. Prentice ◽  
Anthony J. C. Fulford ◽  
Tim H. Clutton-Brock ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Birth Weight ◽  
Environmental Conditions ◽  
Head Circumference ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Offspring Size ◽  
Long Term Effects ◽  
Birth Season ◽  
Intergenerational Effects ◽  
Parental Birth

Environmental conditions experienced in early life can influence an individual's growth and long-term health, and potentially also that of their offspring. However, such developmental effects on intergenerational outcomes have rarely been studied. Here we investigate intergenerational effects of early environment in humans using survey- and clinic-based data from rural Gambia, a population experiencing substantial seasonal stress that influences foetal growth and has long-term effects on first-generation survival. Using Fourier regression to model seasonality, we test whether (i) parental birth season has intergenerational consequences for offspring in utero growth (1982 neonates, born 1976–2009) and (ii) whether such effects have been reduced by improvements to population health in recent decades. Contrary to our predictions, we show effects of maternal birth season on offspring birth weight and head circumference only in recent maternal cohorts born after 1975. Offspring birth weight varied according to maternal birth season from 2.85 to 3.03 kg among women born during 1975–1984 and from 2.84 to 3.41 kg among those born after 1984, but the seasonality effect reversed between these cohorts. These results were not mediated by differences in maternal age or parity. Equivalent patterns were observed for offspring head circumference (statistically significant) and length (not significant), but not for ponderal index. No relationships were found between paternal birth season and offspring neonatal anthropometrics. Our results indicate that even in rural populations living under conditions of relative affluence, brief variation in environmental conditions during maternal early life may exert long-term intergenerational effects on offspring.

scholarly journals Early in life effects and heredity: reconciling neo-Darwinism with neo-Lamarckism under the banner of the inclusive evolutionary synthesis

2019 ◽  
Vol 374 (1770) ◽  
pp. 20180113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Étienne Danchin ◽  
Arnaud Pocheville ◽  
Philippe Huneman
Keyword(s):  
Dna Sequence ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Evolutionary Medicine ◽  
Theme Issue ◽  
Intergenerational Effects ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
Changing Environments ◽  
Gene Concepts ◽  
Early Life Events ◽  
Development And Evolution

Recent discoveries show that early in life effects often have long-lasting influences, sometimes even spanning several generations. Such intergenerational effects of early life events appear not easily reconcilable with strict genetic inheritance. However, an integrative evolutionary medicine of early life effects needs a sound view of inheritance in development and evolution. Here, we show how to articulate the gene-centred and non-gene-centred visions of inheritance. We first recall the coexistence of two gene concepts in scientific discussions, a statistical one (focused on patterns of parent–offspring resemblance, and implicitly including non-DNA-sequence-based resemblance), and a molecular one (based on the DNA sequence). We then show how all the different mechanisms of inheritance recently discovered can be integrated into an inclusive theory of evolution where different mechanisms would enable adaptation to changing environments at different timescales. One surprising consequence of this integrative vision of inheritance is that early in life effects start much earlier than fertilization.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Developing differences: early-life effects and evolutionary medicine’.

scholarly journals Intergenerational effects of early adversity on survival in wild baboons

eLife ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew N Zipple ◽  
Elizabeth A Archie ◽  
Jenny Tung ◽  
Jeanne Altmann ◽  
Susan C Alberts
Keyword(s):  
Early Life ◽  
Early Adversity ◽  
Epigenetic Changes ◽  
Direct Effects ◽  
Intergenerational Effects ◽  
Offspring Quality ◽  
Parental Effect ◽  
Early Life Adversity ◽  
Prospective Longitudinal ◽  
Wild Baboons

Early life adversity can affect an individual’s health, survival, and fertility for many years after the adverse experience. Whether early life adversity also imposes intergenerational effects on the exposed individual’s offspring is not well understood. We fill this gap by leveraging prospective, longitudinal data on a wild, long-lived primate. We find that juveniles whose mothers experienced early life adversity exhibit high mortality before age 4, independent of the juvenile’s own experience of early adversity. These juveniles often preceded their mothers in death by 1 to 2 years, indicating that high adversity females decline in their ability to raise offspring near the end of life. While we cannot exclude direct effects of a parent’s environment on offspring quality (e.g., inherited epigenetic changes), our results are completely consistent with a classic parental effect, in which the environment experienced by a parent affects its future phenotype and therefore its offspring’s phenotype.

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