Conserved epigenetic sensitivity to early life experience in the rat and human hippocampus

Early life experience is associated with long-term effects on behavior and epigenetic programming of the NR3C1 (glucocorticoid receptor) gene in the hippocampus of both rats and humans. However, it is unlikely that such effects completely capture the evolutionarily conserved epigenetic mechanisms of early adaptation to environment. Here we present DNA methylation profiles spanning 6.5 million base pairs centered at the NR3C1 gene in the hippocampus of humans who experienced abuse as children and nonabused controls. Hippocampal samples were obtained from the Quebec Suicide Brain Bank and included 10 suicide subjects with histories of severe childhood abuse and 9 controls with validated negative histories of childhood abuse who did not differ in postmortem interval, sex, age at death, or brain pH (all P > 0.05). Using custom-designed microarrays with probes tiling the 6.5 million base pair region of human chromosome 5 centered at the NR3C1 gene at 100 bp spacing, we obtained DNA methylation profiles by MeDIP-chip. Replicates were performed.