The Transgenerational Inheritance Pattern Study Of H3K4me3 And H3K27me3 Histone Modifications

The emergence of epigenetics enable us have a better understanding of genetic information, which becomes more and more complicated and diversified and is more than what we understood before. Not only genes, the regulation of gene expressions by epigenetic information is crucial to organism development. However, whether epigenetic information can be inherited transgenerationally like DNA double strand information is still unclear. In the early study of our laboratory, we did thorough researches on transgenerational inheritance of DNA methylation. Based on our finding, we aim to explore transgenerational inheritance of histone methylation H3K4me3 and H3K27me3 in this study.Our study aims at analyzing ChIP-seq data of H3K4me3 and H3K27me3 to investigate the transgenerational inheritance patterns of the two histone methylations. In this study, we calculated the distribution of the two histone modifications on the whole genome, and found relatively conserved binding sites and family-specific binding sites among all samples and did GO biological process annotations.By analyzing ChIP-seq data of H3K4me3 and H3K27me3 of 17 males in 6 families at 3 districts, we found that these two types of histone methylation mostly enriched at promoter region and significantly enriched at TSS region. We screened out 77 and 278 relatively conserved peaks of H3K4me3 and H3K27me3, respectively, which indicated that H3K27me3 might be more conserved than H3K4me3. According to the family-specific binding sites analysis, we found that both of H3K4me3 and H3K27me3 modification enriched in three metabolic pathways. Volunteers in the same family have similar life styles and diets. Parental diets can influence the epigenome of descendants, so this result suggested that the two histone modifications maybe play an important role in the transgenerational inheritance of epigenetics induced by parental diets. Differential binding analysis indicated that to a great extent both of the two types of histone methylation had family-specific features. Our study provides powerful evidence to the study of histone methylation transgenerational inheritance.