Research focus: Non-genetic inheritance of allergic diseases
The Gorska Laboratory at National Jewish Health studies how parental environmental exposures and non-genetic inheritance influence the development of allergies and asthma in offspring.
Non-genetic inheritance is the transmission of traits from parents to offspring through mechanisms that do not involve changes to the DNA sequence. The key triggers of non-genetic inheritance are parental environmental exposures. Non-genetic inheritance of environmental information is postulated to influence allergic diseases. Parental environmental exposures can either promote offspring predisposition to allergic disease, or help offspring develop disease resistance. As such, childhood allergic diseases positively associate with maternal exposure to air pollutants, and negatively, with maternal exposure to the farming environment, maternal intake of vegetables, fruits and fish. Our lab develops mouse models to establish a causal relationship between maternal exposure and offspring allergic disease, and studies the underlying mechanisms.
The goals of the lab are to define maternal information that is gained and transmitted to offspring, or lost and not transferred to offspring, elucidate routes of information transfer (placenta?, breast milk?, gametes?), delineate offspring cells that receive maternal information, reveal epigenetic alterations, and study how these cells and epigenetic alterations contribute to the development of allergies and asthma. The lab has particular interest in cells of the immune system. The translational goals are to identify early-life biomarkers of predisposition to allergies and asthma in humans and define targets for development of preventive drugs.
To accomplish these goals, our lab uses mouse models, human tissue samples, and a variety of immunological, molecular, epigenetic, epigenomics and transcriptomics approaches.
Magdalena Maria Gorska, MD, PhD