Paternal nicotine exposure alters hepatic xenobiotic metabolism in offspring
- University of Massachusetts Medical School, United States
Abstract
Paternal environmental conditions can influence phenotypes in future generations, but it is unclear whether offspring phenotypes represent specific responses to particular aspects of the paternal exposure history, or a generic response to paternal 'quality of life'. Here, we establish a paternal effect model based on nicotine exposure in mice, enabling pharmacological interrogation of the specificity of the offspring response. Paternal exposure to nicotine prior to reproduction induced a broad protective response to multiple xenobiotics in male offspring. This effect manifested as increased survival following injection of toxic levels of either nicotine or cocaine, accompanied by hepatic upregulation of xenobiotic processing genes, and enhanced drug clearance. Surprisingly, this protective effect could also be induced by a nicotinic receptor antagonist, suggesting that xenobiotic exposure, rather than nicotinic receptor signaling, is responsible for programming offspring drug resistance. Thus, paternal drug exposure induces a protective phenotype in offspring by enhancing metabolic tolerance to xenobiotics.
Data availability
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Hepatocyte RNA-SeqPublicly available at the NCBI Gene Expression Omnibus (accession no: GSE94059).
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Hepatocyte ATAC-SeqPublicly available at the NCBI Gene Expression Omnibus (accession no: GSE92240).
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institute on Drug Abuse
- Markus P Vallaster
- Jennifer Ngolab
- Rubing Zhao-Shea
- Paul D Gardner
- Andrew R Tapper
- Oliver J Rando
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
- Shweta Kukreja
- Xinyang Y Bing
- Oliver J Rando
National Institutes of Health (F32DA034414)
- Markus P Vallaster
National Institutes of Health (R01DA033664)
- Paul D Gardner
- Andrew R Tapper
- Oliver J Rando
National Institutes of Health (R01HD080224)
- Oliver J Rando
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: This study was performed in strict accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the National Institutes of Health. All of the animals were handled according to an approved institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) protocol (A-1788) of the University of Massachusetts.
Reviewing Editor
- Detlef Weigel, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Germany
Publication history
- Received: December 30, 2016
- Accepted: January 31, 2017
- Accepted Manuscript published: February 14, 2017 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: March 7, 2017 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2017, Vallaster et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Paternal nicotine exposure alters hepatic xenobiotic metabolism in offspring
eLife 6:e24771.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.24771
Further reading
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Exposing male mice to nicotine can make their sons more resistant to nicotine and other drugs.
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Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are emerging as critical regulators of heart physiology and disease, although the studies unveiling their modes of action are still limited to few examples. We recently identified pCharme, a chromatin-associated lncRNA whose functional knockout in mice results in defective myogenesis and morphological remodeling of the cardiac muscle. Here, we combined Cap-Analysis of Gene Expression (CAGE), single-cell (sc)RNA sequencing, and whole-mount in situ hybridization analyses to study pCharme cardiac expression. Since the early steps of cardiomyogenesis, we found the lncRNA being specifically restricted to cardiomyocytes, where it assists the formation of specific nuclear condensates containing MATR3, as well as important RNAs for cardiac development. In line with the functional significance of these activities, pCharme ablation in mice results in a delayed maturation of cardiomyocytes, which ultimately leads to morphological alterations of the ventricular myocardium. Since congenital anomalies in myocardium are clinically relevant in humans and predispose patients to major complications, the identification of novel genes controlling cardiac morphology becomes crucial. Our study offers unique insights into a novel lncRNA-mediated regulatory mechanism promoting cardiomyocyte maturation and bears relevance to Charme locus for future theranostic applications.
