Transgenerational effects of paternal restraint stress in Drosophila

At present, the experimental evidences of epigenetic inheritance caused by stresses are beginning to accumulate in some animal models. However, molecular mechanism and biological meaning underlying these phenomena has not been clearly understood yet. Previously, we showed that Drosophila transcription factor-2 (dATF-2) is involved in heterochromatin formation and that phosphorylation of dATF-2 by various stresses, such as heat shock and osmotic stresses, induces heterochromatin disruption. We also revealed these stress dependent epigenome changes mediated by dATF-2 can be inherited to next generations (Seong et al., 2011). In this study, we established a drosophila model of restraint stress (RS) to analyze the transgenerational effects of strong psychological stress. We observed that Drosophila F1 progenies, derived from RS exposed fathers, showed significant disruption of heterochromatin state and that such effect was not observed in the dATF-2 and MEKK1 mutant background. To reveal trangenerational effects and role of paternal restraint stress, we analyzed gene expression profiles of F1 progenies derived from either RS exposed or control fathers of wild-type and dATF-2 KO father. Overall design: w[1118] females were crossed to w[1118] or dATF-2[KO] males treated with/without restraint stress (RS) (10 hours, 3 times). After that, 6-7-days old F1 progenies were frozen by nitrogen liquid and separated to head and other parts, and then prepared mRNA. RNA-seq dataset include 5-6 biological replicates.