ArticleScience advances2018
Establishment of environmentally sensitive DNA methylation states in the very early human embryo.
Article in Science advances, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 45 papers, 4 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
45 citing papers in PubMed, 4 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 82 citations in OpenAlex.
- Meta-analysis examining fetal sex-specific placental DNA methylation intensities and estimated cell composition post IVF.Molecular human reproduction · 2025Pooled it
- DNA methylation in monozygotic twins discordant for acute lymphoblastic leukemia: a case report and systematic review.Clinical epigenetics · 2025Pooled it
- New insights into the (epi)genetics of twinning.Human reproduction (Oxford, England) · 2024Pooled it
- Analysis of DNA methylation at birth and in childhood reveals changes associated with season of birth and latitude.Clinical epigenetics · 2023Pooled it
- A novel nutritional supplement to reduce plasma homocysteine in nonpregnant women: A randomised controlled trial in The Gambia.PLoS medicine · 2019Trial
- Genetic impacts on within-pair DNA methylation variance in monozygotic twins capture gene-environment interactions and cell-type effects.Genome biology · 2026Article
- Review
- Review
- Mouse metastable epialleles are extremely rare.Nucleic acids research · 2025Article
- Human genomic regions of systemic interindividual epigenetic variation are implicated in neurodevelopmental and metabolic disorders.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Associations between relative abundances ofFrontiers in microbiology · 2025Article
- Differentially methylated regions interrogated for metastable epialleles associate with offspring adiposity.Epigenomics · 2024Article
- DNA methylation abnormalities induced by advanced maternal age in villi prime a high-risk state for spontaneous abortion.Clinical epigenetics · 2023Article
- Does maternal low-dose cadmium exposure increase the risk of offspring to develop metabolic syndrome and/or type 2 diabetes?Life sciences · 2023Review
- The influence of early environment and micronutrient availability on developmental epigenetic programming: lessons from the placenta.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2023Review
- Genomic map of candidate human imprint control regions: the imprintome.Epigenetics · 2022Article
- DNA methylation at birth in monozygotic twins discordant for pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Parental Programming of Offspring Health: The Intricate Interplay between Diet, Environment, Reproduction and Development.Biomolecules · 2022Review
- The combination of DNA methylome and transcriptome revealed the intergenerational inheritance on the influence of advanced maternal age.Clinical and translational medicine · 2022Article
- Tissue- and ethnicity-independent hypervariable DNA methylation states show evidence of establishment in the early human embryo.Nucleic acids research · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
The molecular mechanisms responsible for the developmental origins of later disease are currently unknown. We previously demonstrated that women's periconceptional nutrition predicts their offspring's DNA methylation at metastable epialleles (MEs). We present a genome-wide screen yielding 687 MEs and track their trajectories across nine developmental stages in human in vitro fertilization embryos. MEs exhibit highly unusual methylation dynamics across the implantation-gastrulation transition, producing a large excess of intermediate methylation states, suggesting the potential for differential programming in response to external signals. Using a natural experiment in rural Gambia, we show that genomic regions sensitive to season of conception are highly enriched for MEs and show similar atypical methylation patterns. MEs are enriched for proximal enhancers and transcription start sites and are influenced by genotype. Together, these observations position MEs as distinctive epigenomic features programmed in the early embryo, sensitive to genetic and periconceptional environment, and with the potential to influence phenotype.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.