Collaborative Research: Early life effects on later life biological outcomes: evolutionary and molecular mechanisms

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The environments that people are born and raised in can have profound and long-lasting effects on their biology, but precisely how and why early life environmental factors “get under the skin” to influence physiology and health in later life remains poorly understood. This project explores the mechanistic and evolutionary bases of early life effects on later life biological outcomes in groups living in environments that are dramatically different from those they encountered early in life. Insights from such groups, who are undergoing rapid lifestyle changes due to increasing market integration, acculturation, and urbanization, advance knowledge about biological connections across the lifespan, in the context of biocultural theory. The project may also inform global health research, given that many human groups are undergoing similar lifestyle changes, as well as inform our understanding of the complex causes of some of the greatest health threats faced by people in the United States and other high-income countries. The research provides many scientific training opportunities for undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students, as well as participating community members. Through partnerships with mobile clinics, this research is also directly contributing to improving health care among participating groups. In order to uncover the mechanistic and evolutionary bases of early life effects on later life biological outcomes, this research has three general goals. First, the researchers use detailed interviews and direct measurements of numerous behavioral, anthropometric, and physiological traits to characterize the early life and current environments of study participants and their current physiological status. Second, using these data and previously established modeling methods, the researchers test competing explanations for how early life effects on later life health evolve, including the well-known but insufficiently tested “developmental constraints'' and “predictive adaptive responses” hypotheses. Third, the researchers are using cutting-edge genomic techniques to identify the genes and gene regulatory processes that mediate early life environmental influences on later life health by measuring genome-wide DNA methylation and gene expression levels and linking these genomic mechanisms to both the environmental stimuli to which they are responsive and their downstream health consequences. An especially innovative and promising feature of this research is that it integrates theory and methods from a variety of scientific fields including human evolutionary biology, behavioral ecology, epidemiology, biomedicine, and genomics.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.