Embryonic development requires a correct balancing of maternal and paternal genetic information. This balance is mediated by genomic imprinting, an epigenetic mechanism that leads to parent-of-origin-dependent gene expression. The parental conflict (or kinship) theory proposes that imprinting can evolve due to a conflict between maternal and paternal alleles over resource allocation during seed...

Heritability and genetic correlations realized from both single-trait and antagonistic index selection were compared with paternal half-sib estimates. Primary attention was focused on the genetic correlation between six-week body weight and six-week tail length. Parameters realized from single-trait selection were in excellent agreement with paternal half-sib estimates. However, the realized ge...

Precursory studies of H19 transcription during human foetal development have demonstrated maternally derived monoallelic expression. Analyses in extra-embryonic tissues, however, have been more equivocal, with discernible levels of expression of the paternal allele of H19 documented in the first trimester placenta. By refining the in situ hybridization technique we have developed an assay to en...

We examined the effect of parental folate deficiency on the folate content, global DNA methylation, folate receptor-alpha (FRα), insulin-like-growth factor-2 (IGF-2) and -1 receptor (IGF-1R) in the liver and plasma homocysteine in the postnatal rat. Male and female rats were randomly fed a folic acid-deficient (paternal folate-deficient, PD and maternal folate-deficient, MD), or folic acid-supp...

Recent investigations have shown that the maintenance of genomic imprinting of the murine insulin-like growth factor 2 (Igf2) gene involves at least two factors: the DNA (cytosine-5-)-methyltransferase activity, which is required to preserve the paternal specific expression of Igf2, and the H19 gene (lying 90 kb downstream of Igf2 gene), which upon inactivation leads to relaxation of the Igf2 i...

INTRODUCTION The study of mediating variables and psychological responses to child surgery involves the evaluation of both the patient and the parents as regards different stressors. OBJECTIVE To have a reliable and reproducible valid evaluation tool that assesses the level of paternal involvement in relation to different stressors in the setting of surgery. MATERIAL AND METHOD A self-repor...

BACKGROUND Although some paternal components to the predisposition to pre-eclampsia have been demonstrated recently, it is not known whether such paternal factors play a role to thrombophilia-related perinatal mortality. OBJECTIVE To compare the paternal and maternal contribution to perinatal mortality. STUDY DESIGN Data from a prospective registry of perinatal mortality in a Dutch healthca...

During the summer breeding season, free-living meadow voles do not engage in paternal care. However, in fall when female territoriality declines, social nesting and breeding activity may overlap and adult males nest with females and young. In the laboratory, meadow voles housed under short day (SD) lengths exhibit more and better quality paternal care than those housed under long day (LD) lengt...