VANCOUVER — Great-grandfathers may impart more than engraved watches. A sugar-regulating gene that made a brief appearance in a lineage of mice but wasn’t passed on seems to have made animals up to four generations later resistant to obesity, research presented March 30 at the annual conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology shows.
“This changes the way we think about the inheritance of disease,” said study coauthor Joseph Nadeau of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. The results may force researchers to grapple with complicated transgenerational gene influences.
The surprising effect was caused by the single-generation appearance of a genetic variation that affects the maintenance of blood sugar, Nadeau and his colleagues reported.
In the experiments, researchers allowed two inbred strains of mice to eat as many of the mouse equivalent of double cheeseburgers as they wanted. One type of mice grew obese on the diet and developed a suite of accompanying health problems, such as insulin resistance, high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease. The other type didn’t gain weight, even though these mice ate more than the first type and exercised less.