SCEHSC Seminar Series: “DNA Methylation at Imprint Control Regions, Early Exposures and Obesity in Children” with Cathrine Hoyo, PhD

Join us on Friday, April 5th for the SCEHSC Seminar Series with Cathrine Hoyo, PhD. Register for in person and Zoom attendance here.

In her talk, Dr. Hoyo will discuss challenges we face investigating early exposure to chemical and non-chemical stressors, and their effects on metabolic dysfunction and other common chronic diseases, and how DNA methylation of sequence regions regulating the monoallelic expression of imprinted genes, some of which may be associated with obesity, can address some of the challenges we face. She will also discuss the new Illumina Human Imprintome Methylation Array together with new imprinted genes, and how this could accelerate discovery of chemical and non-chemical stress-responsive epigenetic response, genome-wide, and with that, guide public health intervention efforts for common chronic diseases.

Dr. Hoyo is an epidemiologist and Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at North Carolina State University, and co-leader of the Integrative Health Science Facility Core in the Center for Human Health and the Environment. Her research has the overarching goal of improving our understanding of how early development influences risk of common chronic diseases, especially those that exhibit racial/ethnic differences in incidence and/or mortality, including cardiometabolic diseases and some cancers. To accomplish this, her research program has taken a two pronged approach: i) develop and continue to follow a cohort of newborns to identify stable epigenetic targets that are acquired early and are mitotically heritable and are associated with known risk factors for early obesity as such markers can serve as risk markers, and (ii) conduct population-based case control studies to determine whether identified epigenetic targets are associated with risk of these obesity-related chronic diseases in adulthood.