Small RNAs transmit big epigenetic message: Intergenerational reprogramming of metabolism

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Can information about the parent’s environment pass to the next generation? For example, can what the father eat effect the risk for his children to be obese. These are the questions we are trying to answer in my lab. To our help we have the little fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, that has a very short generation time and is easy to manipulate with genetic tools. I will talk about epigenetic inheritance and how that might have implications for metabolic disease such as type 2 diabetes and obesity.