Your Grandparents’ Experiences Can Affect Your Genes

‘Studies of human populations suggest that our health and longevity could be affected by the diets and experiences of our grandparents. For example, studies of a small community in northern Sweden where detailed historical records were kept found correlations between food availability for one generation and the mortality rate for that generation’s grandchildren.
But the exact nature of these effects and how they are transmitted across generations remain unclear. In Susan Strome’s lab at UC Santa Cruz, research on a tiny roundworm called C. elegans is helping to solve this puzzle.
“NIH is supporting this basic research in a model organism because it is the only way to crack open the mechanisms behind the correlations seen in human studies. You can’t do these kinds of experiments in humans,” said Strome, a distinguished professor of molecular, cell, and developmental biology.’
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