Meeting Abstract
Increasingly, studies are revealing that the environmental challenges experienced by an organism can not only have multiple effects on an individual level, but that these challenges may also impact unexposed offspring. Hypoxia is a physiological challenge that many aquatic organisms encounter in their environment, resulting in in numerous physiological, phenotypic, and epigenetic changes in aquatic organisms. In this study, we use zebrafish (Danio rerio) as a model to investigate how paternal hypoxia experience impacts subsequent progeny. Males were exposed to moderate hypoxia (11-13 kPA) for 2 weeks, bred to create an F1 generation, and progeny underwent an acute hypoxia (0-1 kPA) tolerance assay. Using time to loss of equilibrium as a measure of hypoxia resistance, we show that paternal exposure to hypoxia endow offspring with a greater tolerance to acute hypoxia, compared to offspring of unexposed males. In addition to phenotypic alternations, we also investigated changes in gene expression in offspring. We conducted RNA-Seq on whole fry and detected 89 differentially expressed genes, including two hemoglobin genes and a selenoprotein that are significantly upregulated by more than 4-fold in hypoxia offspring. Paternal exposures to physiological challenges are thus able to impact the phenotype and gene expression of their unexposed progeny. Future research will investigate whether changes in DNA methylation underpin the observed changes in phenotype and gene expression.
