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UGI Seminar: Dr Alice Balard
27 November 2024, 3:00 pm–4:00 pm
DNA methylation provides a molecular basis for disease tolerance and intergenerational paternal effects
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Contact Nancy Bird if you wish to meet the speaker
Speaker: Alice Balard (Hellenthal Group, UGI, GEE)
Date: 27 November 2024 at 3pm
Venue: 309 Roberts Building (directions)
'DNA methylation provides a molecular basis for disease tolerance and intergenerational paternal effects'
The talk will present an exploration of the role of DNA methylation in the evolution of disease tolerance in three-spined stickleback fish. We investigated how paternal infection affects offspring DNA methylation and its relationship to tolerance. We found that fathers' infection status strongly influenced their offspring's methylation patterns, even more so than the effects of the offspring's own infection status. We identified specific methylation marks associated with tolerance, potentially serving as biomarkers. These findings provide new insights into the molecular mechanisms of tolerance and transgenerational immune priming, highlighting the importance of epigenetic inheritance in host-parasite interactions and evolution.
About the Speaker
Alice Balard
at UCL, Department of Genetics, Evolution & Environment
Alice is a new Research Fellow in the Hellenthal lab, developing statistical models to detect and characterise loci for which methylation marks likely are established in the early embryo, and can influence long term health in humans.
After studying veterinary medicine (ENVA, France), she transitioned to bioinformatics and evolutionary biology with a PhD in Biomedical Sciences in the FU Berlin, Germany, during which she focused on the evolution of trade-offs between resistance and tolerance of the house mouse against the coccidia parasite Eimeria. She then joined the Eizaguirre lab at QMUL thanks to a EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship to work on the molecular epigenetic mechanisms of transgenerational transmission of immunity in stickleback fish, and following this was a Teaching Fellow at QMUL for a year.
More about Alice Balard