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While physiologic stress has long been known to impair mammalian reproductive capacity through hormonal dysregulation, mounting evidence now suggests that stress experienced prior to or during gestation may also negatively impact the health of future offspring. Rodent models of gestational physiologic stress can induce neurologic and behavioral changes that persist for up to three generations, suggesting that stress signals can induce lasting epigenetic changes in the germline. Treatment with glucocorticoid stress hormones is sufficient to recapitulate the transgenerational changes seen in physiologic stress models. These hormones are known to bind and activate the glucocorticoid receptor (GR), a ligand-inducible transcription factor, thus implicating GR-mediated signaling as a potential contributor to the transgenerational inheritance of stress-induced phenotypes. Here, we demonstrate dynamic spatiotemporal regulation of GR expression in the mouse germline, showing expression in the fetal oocyte as well as the perinatal and adult spermatogonia. Functionally, we find that fetal oocytes are intrinsically buffered against changes in GR signaling, as neither genetic deletion of GR nor GR agonism with dexamethasone altered the transcriptional landscape or the progression of fetal oocytes through meiosis. In contrast, our studies revealed that the male germline is susceptible to glucocorticoid-mediated signaling, specifically by regulating RNA splicing within the spermatogonia, although this does not abrogate fertility. Together, our work suggests a sexually dimorphic function for GR in the germline, and represents an important step towards understanding the mechanisms by which stress can modulate the transmission of genetic information through the germline.
Pubmed ID: 38226689
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Collection of genome databases for vertebrates and other eukaryotic species with DNA and protein sequence search capabilities. Used to automatically annotate genome, integrate this annotation with other available biological data and make data publicly available via web. Ensembl tools include BLAST, BLAT, BioMart and the Variant Effect Predictor (VEP) for all supported species.
View all literature mentionsComputable knowledge regarding functions of genes and gene products. GO resources include biomedical ontologies that cover molecular domains of all life forms as well as extensive compilations of gene product annotations to these ontologies that provide largely species-neutral, comprehensive statements about what gene products do. Used to standardize representation of gene and gene product attributes across species and databases.
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View all literature mentionsCommercial instrument and chemical vendor. Developer and manufacturer of specialized technological products for life science research and clinical diagnostics markets.
View all literature mentionsSoftware package for the analysis of gene expression microarray data, especially the use of linear models for analyzing designed experiments and the assessment of differential expression.
View all literature mentionsBioconductor software package for Empirical analysis of Digital Gene Expression data in R. Used for differential expression analysis of RNA-seq and digital gene expression data with biological replication.
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View all literature mentionsGraph-based alignment of next generation sequencing reads to a population of genomes.
View all literature mentionsSoftware package for differential gene expression analysis based on the negative binomial distribution. Used for analyzing RNA-seq data for differential analysis of count data, using shrinkage estimation for dispersions and fold changes to improve stability and interpretability of estimates.
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