Pitru Impact: Mice can ‘warn’ sons, grandsons of dangers via sperm

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Environment, Epigenetics, Pitru

pitru

Much of our life’s programming is done by father (and mother too) and his responses to environment.

Imperfection is human trait. So all parents are imperfect. With their own limitations, bad habits, their time’s compulsions and विकृति(s). This is the reason I keep insisting value of पितृ तर्पण. This is to get rid of parental imperfection. Both mental (mind/habits) and physical (genes). And get blessed by ancestors.


Research


Mice can ‘warn’ sons, grandsons of dangers via sperm

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/12/02/3902972.htm

Lab mice trained to fear a particular smell can transfer the impulse to their unborn sons and grandsons through a mechanism in their sperm, a study reveals.

The research claims to provide evidence for the concept of animals “inheriting” a memory of their ancestors’ traumas, and responding as if they had lived the events themselves.

It is the latest find in the study of epigenetics, in which environmental factors are said to cause genes to start behaving differently without any change to their underlying DNA encoding.

“Knowing how ancestral experiences influence descendant generations will allow us to understand more about the development of neuropsychiatric disorders that have a transgenerational basis,” says study co-author Brian Dias of the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia.

And it may one day lead to therapies that can soften the memory “inheritance”.

For the study, Dias and co-author Kerry Ressler trained mice, using foot shocks, to fear an odour that resembles cherry blossoms.

Later, they tested the extent to which the animals’ offspring startled when exposed to the same smell. The younger generation had not even been conceived when their fathers underwent the training, and had never smelt the odour before the experiment.

The offspring of trained mice were “able to detect and respond to far less amounts of odour… suggesting they are more sensitive” to it, says Ressler co-author of the study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

They did not react the same way to other odours, and compared to the offspring of non-trained mice, their reaction to the cherry blossom whiff was about 200 percent stronger, he says.

The scientists then looked at a gene (M71) that governs the functioning of an odour receptor in the nose that responds specifically to the cherry blossom smell.

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