Transgenerational Inheritance of Odour-Specific Fear Memory

Vollständiger Abstract

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Transgenerational epigenetic inheritance suggests that environmental experiences can influence offspring biology through mechanisms that do not involve changes to DNA sequence. Previous studies have demonstrated that paternal fear conditioning to a specific odour can alter offspring sensitivity and behavioural responses to that same odour, indicating that parental experiences may be transmitted across generations. However, the neural mechanisms underlying these effects remain poorly understood. This study investigates the neural mechanisms underlying this phenomenon. Using ArcCreERT2; Ai14 mice, F0 males will be fear-conditioned to acetophenone to examine experience-dependent changes potentially associated with germline epigenetic modifications. F1 offspring will then undergo odour conditioning with three distinct odours, and their brains will be analysed using confocal microscopy to quantify activity-dependent engram formation. Comparisons between the offspring of conditioned and control fathers will assess whether paternal experience selectively biases the neural representation of acetophenone. The author hypothesises that F1 offspring of conditioned fathers will exhibit an increased acetophenone-associated engram compared to controls, suggesting that paternal experience may bias memory encoding in offspring.