Epigenetic Influence on Memory Formation and Inheritance (Isabelle Mansuy)

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Professor Isabelle Mansuy, Ph.D., from the University of Zürich and the ETH Zürich, to talk about her work on epigenetic influences on memory formation and inheritance.

Dr. Mansuy received her Ph.D. from the Friedrich Miescher Institute, Basel, Switzerland in 1994. After doing a postdoc at the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the Columbia University in New York, she moved to Zürich and became Assistant Professor in Neurobiology at the Department of Biology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 1998. In 2004 Dr. Mansuy became Professor at the Brain Research Institute of the University Zurich, where, in 2007, she became Managing Director. Since 2013 she has been a full Professor in Neuroepigenetics at the University of Zürich and at the ETH in Zürich.

Dr. Isabelle Mansuy's work centers around the formation of memories and how those memories are inherited. She started to work on memory formation in the beginning of her research career, where she investigated the influence of calcineurin and Zif268 in this process. In the early 2010s she pivoted and transitioned to work on transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. To investigate this field of research she created an unbiased experiment that allowed her to study the transgenerational influence of early life stress, which she was able to observe for across up to 4 generations through the germline.

If you want to learn more about the challenges and obstacles that needed to be overcome to create this novel experimental approach to tackle the questions of and which epigenetic factors might influence transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, don't miss out on this episode.

References

• Karsten Baumgärtel, David Genoux, … Isabelle M. Mansuy (2008) Control of the establishment of aversive memory by calcineurin and Zif268 (Nature Neuroscience) DOI: 10.1038/nn.2113
• Tamara B. Franklin, Holger Russig, … Isabelle M. Mansuy (2010) Epigenetic Transmission of the Impact of Early Stress Across Generations (Biological Psychiatry) DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2010.05.036
• Johannes Gräff, Bisrat T. Woldemichael, … Isabelle M. Mansuy (2012) Dynamic histone marks in the hippocampus and cortex facilitate memory consolidation (Nature Communications) DOI: 10.1038/ncomms1997
• Eloïse A. Kremer, Niharika Gaur, … Isabelle M. Mansuy (2018) Interplay between TETs and microRNAs in the adult brain for memory formation (Scientific Reports) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-19806-z
• Katharina Gapp, Ali Jawaid, … Isabelle M. Mansuy (2014) Implication of sperm RNAs in transgenerational inheritance of the effects of early trauma in mice (Nature Neuroscience) DOI: 10.1038/nn.3695
• Katharina Gapp, Saray Soldado-Magraner, … Isabelle M. Mansuy (2014) Early life stress in fathers improves behavioural flexibility in their offspring (Nature Communications) DOI: 10.1038/ncomms6466

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