Weinberg – prenatal alcohol & epigenetics

One area that has now become a very active area in this field, and an area that we are beginning to work on as well, along with colleagues at UBC, Michael Kobor is our main collaborator; is to look at the field of epigenetics. Epigenetics describes changes in gene expression that occur without changes in the DNA. So DNA is the; are the substances that make up the genes, and we all have heard of the idea of mutations in the genes where the gene itself has actually changed in some structural way. What epigenetics is about is; not changes in the structure of the DNA, the DNA is normal, it’s the same in everybody, but what differs is whether genes are turned on or off, and at what level are they turned on or off. Mike Kobor always uses the idea of a rheostat used to regulate lights. Right, so you can turn on the lights and then you can make them brighter, or dimmer. And that’s how we can think of changes in how genes are expressed. They’re expressed at low levels, or they’re expressed at high levels. And what alcohol seems to do, and other early life insults: nutritional insults, other toxic things in the environment, early life stress; prenatal and early postnatal, all seem to have effects on gene expression; whether genes are turned on or off.  

So we’re beginning to look at that in our work also, and we’re of course particularly interested in genes related to the stress system and the immune system. And so those are the areas we’re targeting. Initially, rather than focus in on specific genes, we did a more global study looking at changes in gene expression in general, looking at all the genes in the brain. And we found changes specific to our prenatal alcohol exposure in many genes in different parts of the brain. And those genes that we identified are related to stress and immune function, they are related to normal development, they’re related to cell signaling; how cells work. And so they; they are genes that you might expect to be altered by a substance like alcohol, or by any insult to the body. And we found a number of genes that are specific to alcohol, and now we’re pursuing that further to look at; to try to target more specifically what genes are altered and how they’re altered.