Dr. Rando is a professor at UMass Chan Medical School in Biochemistry and Molecular Biotechnology, an internationally recognized pioneer in the epigenetic influence of sperm on egg fertilization and resulting offspring development in murine models.
Dr. Rando walked through more than a decade of his lab’s work showing that it can, at least in mice, and that sperm themselves carry the message. Males fed a low-protein diet sired offspring with altered cholesterol metabolism, an effect that held up even through IVF. Rando traced much of this information to small RNAs that sperm pick up as they mature in the epididymis, some of which regulate gene expression in the earliest stages of embryonic development.
“The epigenetic information carriers listen to the world and sometimes make it into the next generation.”
He also made the provocative case that most published measurements of sperm chromatin may have been skewed by contamination, and candidly laid out the open questions in his own model. It was a talk as thought-provoking as it was rigorous.
“They’re really just delivering a whisper of RNA to the embryo.”