The Developmental Origins of Health and Disease is a research paradigm that suggests that the environment experienced in utero, and potentially even pre-conception, can have lifelong impacts on offspring health. Elegant epidemiologic studies of natural experiments have provided us the initial data supporting this phenomenon, and our laboratory is focused on providing important insights into the molecular underpinnings of developmental programming.
The Developmental Origins of Health and Disease is a research paradigm that suggests that the environment experienced in utero, and potentially even pre-conception, can have lifelong impacts on offspring health. Elegant epidemiologic studies of natural experiments have provided us the initial data supporting this phenomenon, and our laboratory is focused on providing important insights into the molecular underpinnings of developmental programming.
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The placenta, through functions including nutrient transfer, metabolism, gas exchange, neuroendocrine signaling, growth hormone production, and immunologic control, serves as the master regulator of the intrauterine environment. This organ is one of the few sites with documented expression of enzymes and proteins found primarily in the human brain and with an expression profile similar in complexity to the human brain. Our group has spearheaded efforts to examine the impacts of common environmental chemical and psychosocial exposures on these placental molecular functions, through interrogation of the placental genome and epigenome, and demonstrated links between molecular and genomic variations in the placenta with critical early life growth and neurobehavioral functioning.
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Our laboratory has examined a variety of environmental factors that can contribute to longterm health and disease risk. In the placenta, we have explored DNA methylation, hydroxymethylation, gene expression and transcriptomics, microRNA and other noncoding RNA expression, developing links between variation in these molecular features, environmental factors, and a variety of childhood health outcomes.
