Jan-Wilhelm Kornfeld receives ERC Starting Grant

Obesity and T2D affect large populations globally and will soon cause declines in life expectancy if untreated. This pandemic proportion of obesity and the inaptitude of anti-obesity approaches partly reflect our limited understanding of its complex environmental and genetic etiology. Interestingly, even cummulative genetic risk scores, for instance disase-associated SNPs, cannot account for the high heritability of metabolic diseases and therefore other nongenetic modes of inheritance have been postulated. Studies in mice and epidemiological reports demonstrated that paternal obesity is heritable and deteriorates glucose metabolism in coming generations independently from changes to genomic DNA. Using Next-Generation RNA-Sequencing, epigenomic profiling in vivo and novel computational tools, Dr. Kornfeld aims to identify and characterize key epigenetic regulators such as noncoding RNAs, histone codes as well as DNA methylation in the male germline that could provide conceptual insight into this intriguing mode of transgenerational crosstalk.