Postdoctoral fellow Ana Pereira and advisor Yun Zhang, Professor of Organismic & Evolutionary Biology, together describe a new project that was recently awarded funding from the Dean’s Competitive Fund for Promising Scholarship:

Food choices are central to human health. What food we prefer is strongly driven by our response to the smell of the food. While food preference is in part genetically determined, previous work in many species, including humans, shows that it is also regulated by an individual’s life history. The preference for food smells begins during the embryonic development. Behavioral studies show that the in utero environment, which is substantially affected by the mother’s diet, likely regulates the progeny’s olfactory response to food.

In our current project, using roundworms as a model system–we ask how the preference for food odorants in adult worms is regulated by their mother’s diet during their in utero development. We feed the microbe-eating C. elegans mothers with different bacterial strains and probe in their adult progeny the olfactory preference for the food that was consumed by the mother when the adult progeny was developing in utero. Our results show that there is a strong correlation between the progeny’s preference toward the smell of a given food and its mother’s consumption of that same food.

To understand the correlation, we are currently analyzing the changes in gene expression induced by the foods ingested by the mothers in both the mothers and their progeny. The result of this analysis will provide candidate genes that are involved in this early experience-dependent changes in the progeny’s olfactory responses. We are also addressing the potential mechanisms underlying the changes in gene expression.

In sum, our awarded project (https://research.fas.harvard.edu/deans-competitive-fund-promising-scholarship) connects several research directions, including behavioral analysis, neuronal function, gene regulation and development, to address the effect of very early experience on the function of the nervous system. The Dean’s award will provide critical support for us to establish this project.