| Abstract | Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease that is the most common cause of dementia, for which there is currently no cure. The Mediterranean diet (MD) is a candidate prevention strategy because it has been shown to reduce risk of AD development/mortality. In comparison, a typical American diet (TAD) has been shown to increase risk of AD development. However, the underlying mechanism is unknown. One largely unexplored mechanism of dietary-induced AD prevalence is epigenetic modification to genes associated with AD. Therefore, this study aims to determine whether dietary influences can induce epigenetic modifications, and subsequently modify expression of genes associated with AD. To do this, DNA was extracted from hippocampal tissue of mice on either a MD or TAD, as well as their offspring who were consuming a control diet. The offspring were included to determine if differential methylation patterns are heritable, thereby implicating transgenerational effects and predisposition to AD development or protection. An epigenetic array was used to identify loci that were differentially methylated between diets, and qPCR was used to determine if differential methylation resulted in significant differences in gene expression. No loci were found to be significantly differentially methylated (p-val<0.0001) with an effect size of 10% or more, nor differentially expressed upon qPCR analysis. |
