Meeting Abstract
Maternal stress can have transgenerational consequences on the neurodevelopment and behavior of offspring that can influence offspring performance and population evolutionary trajectories. In this study we use threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus), an important ecological and evolutionary model, to show that maternal stress has divergent effects on brain gene expression patterns in male and female offspring. Genes that were up-regulated by maternal stress in male offspring were down-regulated in females and vice versa. In males, genes that were up-regulated by maternal stress were enriched for processes involved in neural development and function, whereas in females genes that were up-regulated by maternal stress were enriched for processes involved in protein translation and metabolic functions. These data suggest that maternal stress has transgenerational effects on cellular pathways that differ depending on the sex of the offspring, which has important implications for assessing the long-term ecological and evolutionary impacts of stress across generations.
