Abstract
Recent studies show that emotional and environmental stimuli promote epigenetic inheritance and influence behavioral development in the subsequent generations. Caloric mal- and under-nutrition has been shown to cause metabolic disturbances in the subsequent generation, but the incentive properties of paternal binge-like eating in offspring is still unknown. Here we show that paternal sucrose self-administration experience could induce inter-generational decrease in both sucrose and cocaine-seeking behavior, and sucrose responding in F1 rats, but not F2, correlated with the performance of F0 rats in sucrose self-administration. Higher anxiety level and decreased cocaine sensitivity were observed in Sucrose F1 compared with Control F1, possibly contributing to the desensitization phenotype in cocaine and sucrose self-administration. Our study revealed that paternal binge-like sucrose consumption causes decrease in reward seeking and induces anxiety-like behavior in the F1 offspring.
Highlights
In recent years, accumulating evidence indicates that ancestral environmental experience may result in the transmission of developmentally induced and stochastically generated phenotypes from one generation of individuals to the promoting non-Mendelian epigenetic inheritance and influence the development and behavior for one or a few subsequent generations (Jablonka and Raz, 2009; Miska and Ferguson-Smith, 2016)
As we observed significant reduced FR5 responding to sucrose in Sucrose F1 vs. Control F1, we tested the responding to cocaine to see if the effect is specific to sucrose or a general one
We examined the effects of sucrose-induced reinforcement in the offspring
Summary
In recent years, accumulating evidence indicates that ancestral environmental experience may result in the transmission of developmentally induced and stochastically generated phenotypes from one generation of individuals to the promoting non-Mendelian epigenetic inheritance and influence the development and behavior for one or a few subsequent generations (Jablonka and Raz, 2009; Miska and Ferguson-Smith, 2016). Recent findings suggest that emotional and environmental stimuli, including changes in nutritional and emotional status, or large consumption of chemicals (Roberts et al, 2007; Dias and Ressler, 2014; Bohacek and Mansuy, 2015; Toth, 2015), could facilitate behavioral plasticity and alter neurodevelopment in offspring, to adapt to the dynamic changes in the surrounding environment (Richards, 2006; Skinner et al, 2011; Manikkam et al, 2013). Paternal chronic high-fat diet ingestion lead to early onset of impaired insulin secretion and glucose tolerance in their female offspring (Ng et al, 2010). Metabolic diseases such as diabetes has been shown to exhibit paternal transmission (Wei et al, 2014). The incentive motivational properties of food reward on offspring has been largely neglected
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