Collaborative Research: Parental Effects, Telomere Dynamics, and the Cross-generational Consequences of Stressors

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Stress experienced by parents often has long-lasting effects on offspring. One intriguing but untested possibility is that stressors in parents alter their genes and these changes may then influence offspring. This project investigates this possibility using controlled experiments and field surveys in a bird system. The results will contribute to the understanding of mechanisms and consequences of cross-generation effects of environmental stressors, which is critical to understanding the long-term impacts of environmental change on organisms. This project incorporates students at several levels, from high school to post-graduate, who will be embedded in a mentoring network. This experience will give them thorough training in all aspects of being a scientist, including proposal writing, conducting research in the field and the lab, giving presentations, and preparing publications. Students will be actively recruited through Research to Improve Diversity and Education (RIDE), an organization that is dedicated to increasing the number of minorities in science, including local Tribal colleges in North Dakota. Moreover, the research team will also develop inquiry-based learning modules using data from the study for high school and college students that will be presented at Tribal colleges. This collaborative research project will assess the importance of an alternative mechanism of inheritance, direct effects of stressors on the DNA (telomeres) in parental gametes that are inherited by offspring. This mechanism would be a new route by which parental stress can impact offspring, and the study will document the lifetime effects on fitness of both this direct pathway and any indirect ones. These results will significantly expand the understanding of the mechanisms and functional consequences of cross-generational effects of environmental stressors, which is likely to be critical for predicting the long-term impacts of environmental change. In addition, this research will provide novel information about telomere length and loss rate in a wild system. Telomeres are increasingly used as a measure of biological aging in physiological ecology, yet there is still a lack of basic knowledge about the inheritance patterns and fitness consequences of variation in telomere length and loss rate in free-living organisms. The integrative approach employed spans molecular, hormonal and whole organism responses and in doing so will offer unique insight into the mechanistic underpinnings and functional consequences of stress exposure across generations. The results will add to our ability to assess how increasing stress levels will impact age-structured population dynamics and the potential for mitigating the impacts of early adversity for individuals and their descendants.