Sperm and methylation:
There has been a global increase in metabolic disease. (Elizabeth J. Radford et al. In Utero Undernourishment Perturbs the Adult Sperm Methylome and Intergenerational Metabolism Nature vol. 345 no. 6198 August 16, 2014 page 785) I am sort of a one trick pony of course. Show me a problem that is global and I will start to think about how it is caused by outbreeding. This time I seem to be off the mark. At first it looks ok. The weight of the evidence is that outbreeding depression is due to some sort of epigenetic process, and the epigenetic process I am most familiar with is methylation of DNA. Sperm are related to fertility. So if something is messing up the methylation of sperm and the result is infertility, things seem promising.
And true to the title, if male embryonic mice are subjected to maternal starvation then their sperm are altered in such a way as that their offspring are likely to have metabolic problems. But before you grope for a mechanism in that direction, consider; they apparently did not see this effect being transmitted from generation to generation. If good nutrition returns, so does good methylation.
So the DNA methylation sites in question here apparently are not the same as the DNA methylation sites I think I am pursuing. Well there are a lot more sites in there, so all is not lost.
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