Speaker:  James A. Coffman, Ph.D., Associate Professor, MDIBL.  Director, Maine IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE)

How much does your health, your susceptibility to disease, and your rate of aging depend on the environment in which you were raised? Or for that matter, on the environments to which your parents or grandparents were exposed? Quite a lot it turns out. Over the past couple of decades epidemiological studies and research with animal models have revealed that chronic stress, traumatic experiences, or other toxic environmental exposures in early life can affect development in a way that impacts how the body responds to stressors later in life, and which can be transmitted epigenetically to subsequent generations. Such “developmental programming” has been linked to increased risk of developing an array of inflammatory diseases, behavioral problems, and mental illness. The Coffman lab seeks to understand the developmental and epigenetic mechanisms underlying this correlation. Using zebrafish as a model organism, they have discovered a stress-responsive genetic circuit that appears to be a critical regulator of the stress response. Elucidating how early life stressors interact with this circuit to compromise its function will provide information that can be used to design therapies for stress-induced disease.

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