Epigenetic Vestiges of Early Developmental Adversity: Child Stress Exposure and Adolescent DNA Methylation

ABSTRACT: Fifteen-year-old adolescents (N = 109) in a longitudinal study of child development were recruited to examine differences in DNA methylation in relation to parent reports of adversity during the adolescents’ infancy and preschool periods. Microarray technology applied to 28,000 cytosine–guanine dinucleotide sites within DNA derived from buccal epithelial cells showed differential methylation among adolescents whose parents reported high levels of stress during their children’s early lives. Maternal stressors in infancy and paternal stressors in the preschool years were most strongly predictive of differential methylation, and the patterning of such epigenetic marks varied by children’s gender. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first report of prospective associations between adversities in early childhood and the epigenetic conformation of adolescents’ genomic DNA. Genomic DNA was extracted from 109 Buccal DNA samples, bisulphite converted and hybridized, along with 4 technical replicates to the Illumina Infinium HumanMethylation27 Beadchip v1.2 for genome wide DNA methylation profiling. Processed signal intensity data and Detection Pvalues for individual replicates of Samples 006 (reps a,b), 099 (reps a,b,c), 106 (reps a,b) reported in the supplementary file "processed_individual reps.txt."

ORGANISM(S): Homo sapiens

SUBMITTER: Michael Kobor 

PROVIDER: E-GEOD-25892 | biostudies-arrayexpress |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-arrayexpress