Abstract
BackgroundEnvironmental changes of biotic or abiotic nature during critical periods of early development may exert a profound influence on physiological functions later in life. This process, named developmental programming can also be driven through parental nutrition. At molecular level, epigenetic modifications are the most likely candidate for persistent modulation of genes expression in later life.ResultsIn order to investigate epigenetic modifications induced by programming in rainbow trout, we focused on bnip3 and bnip3l paralogous genes known to be sensitive to environmental changes but also regulated by epigenetic modifications. Two specific stimuli were used: (i) early acute hypoxia applied at embryo stage and (ii) broodstock and fry methionine deficient diet, considering methionine as one of the main methyl-group donor needed for DNA methylation. We observed a programming effect of hypoxia with an increase of bnip3a and the four paralogs of bnip3l expression level in fry. In addition, parental methionine nutrition was correlated to bnip3a and bnip3lb1 expression showing evidence for early fry programming. We highlighted that both stimuli modified DNA methylation levels at some specific loci of bnip3a and bnip3lb1.ConclusionOverall, these data demonstrate that methionine level and hypoxia stimulus can be of critical importance in metabolic programming. Both stimuli affected DNA methylation of specific loci, among them, an interesting CpG site have been identified, namely − 884 bp site of bnip3a, and may be positively related with mRNA levels.
Highlights
Environmental changes of biotic or abiotic nature during critical periods of early development may exert a profound influence on physiological functions later in life
We focused on bnip3, and bnip3like, two genes involved in mitochondrial mediated apoptosis and/or mitochondrial autophagy upon diverse cellular stress including hypoxia [26,27,28]
In order to confirm the identity of the identified genes, a percentage identity matrix was established after alignment of the deduced amino acids sequences of these genes with those of bcl-2/E1B-19 K interacting protein3 (BNIP3) and BNIP3L from other vertebrate species including human, mouse, chicken, lizard, coelacanth spotted gar, zebrafish, medaka and stickleback (Additional file 1: Figure S1)
Summary
Environmental changes of biotic or abiotic nature during critical periods of early development may exert a profound influence on physiological functions later in life This process, named developmental programming can be driven through parental nutrition. Biotic and abiotic environmental changes encountered during critical early windows of developmental plasticity may exert a profound influence on physiological functions later in life [1]. This process named “developmental programming” has been proposed to prepare adult phenotypes to better cope with specific environment [2,3,4]. In 2007, Vagner et al showed higher and Most of these studies applied a nutritional stimulus at first exogenous feeding. An acute hypoxic stimulus applied in rainbow trout at
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