The aim of the present study was to identify polymorphisms in the leptin gene of 112 pigs and compare the maternal and paternal lineage of Pietrain and Large White breeds that underwent a divergent selection for over 30 years. DNA samples extracted from the blood of these animals were amplified by polymerase chain reaction and genotyped by restriction fragment length polymorphism using the rest...

BACKGROUND The adverse effects of advancing maternal age on offspring's health and development are well understood. Much less is known about the impact of paternal age. METHODS We explored paternal age-offspring cognition associations in 772 participants from the West of Scotland Twenty-07 study. Offspring cognitive ability was assessed using Part 1 of the Alice Heim 4 (AH4) test of General I...

Cytoplasmic incompatibility (CI) is a reproductive sterility found in arthropods that is caused by the endoparasitic bacteria Wolbachia. In CI, host progeny fail to develop during early embryogenesis if Wolbachia-infected males fertilize uninfected females. It is widely accepted that this lethality is caused by some unknown Wolbachia-induced modification of the paternal nuclear material in the ...

BACKGROUND There is emerging evidence of the significance of paternal mental health problems among the expectant fathers during the antenatal and postnatal period. The present study aims at determining the prevalence of paternal perinatal anxiety and identifying its risk factors among the fathers. METHODS A total of 622 expectant fathers were recruited in Hong Kong. The expectant fathers were...

The challenge hypothesis (Wingfield et al. 1990, American Naturalist, 136, 829–846) predicts varying androgen responses to mating, breeding or territorial behaviour in avian males. At the interspecific level, the highest androgen responsiveness has been observed in males from monogamous species with paternal incubation, and the lowest in males from promiscuous, nonpaternal species. Studies of a...

Widespread evidence exists that when relatives live together, kinship plays a central role in shaping the evolution of social behaviour. Previous studies showed that female rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) recognize familiar maternal kin using vocal cues. Recognizing paternal kin might, however, be more difficult as rhesus females mate promiscuously during the possible conception period, most p...

Children of older fathers carry an increased risk for developing autism and other disorders. To elucidate the underlying mechanisms, we investigated the correlation of sperm DNA methylation with paternal age and its impact on the epigenome of the offspring. Methylation levels of nine candidate genes and LINE-1 repeats were quantified by bisulfite pyrosequencing in sperm DNA of 162 donors and 19...

The incorporation of the paternal genome into the zygote during fertilization requires chromatin remodeling. The maternal haploid (mh) mutation in Drosophila affects this process and leads to the formation of haploid embryos without the paternal genome. mh encodes the Drosophila homolog of SPRTN, a conserved protease essential for resolving DNA-protein cross-linked products. Here we characteriz...

Paternal age at conception has been found to predict the number of new genetic mutations. We examined the effect of father's age at birth on offspring intelligence, head circumference and personality traits. Using the Minnesota Twin Family Study sample we tested paternal age effects while controlling for parents' trait levels measured with the same precision as offspring's. From evolutionary ge...

BACKGROUND Many human epidemiologic studies demonstrate that maternal asthma confers greater risk of asthma to offspring than does paternal disease. However, a handful have shown the opposite. Given this disparity, a meta-analysis is necessary to determine the veracity and magnitude of the "maternal effect." METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We screened the medical literature from 1966 to 2009 a...