Childhood trauma is an important risk factor for psychiatric and physical ailments during adulthood. Emerging evidence from rodent studies suggests that behavioral and metabolic symptoms of childhood trauma are transmissible across generations. However, the translational implications of this novel concept are in the preliminary stages.
Our work involves a systematic examination of epigenetic regulators, specifically microRNAs, in serum, sperm, and milk samples collected from ethnically diverse human trauma cohorts. Specifically, microRNAs were analyzed in the serum of Pakistani children with recent trauma in the form of paternal loss and maternal separation (PLMS), sperm of adult Pakistani men with a history of complex trauma before age 17, milk of lactating Polish mothers with a history of adverse childhood experiences, and the serum sperm of adult men and exposed to the Srebrenica genocide in Bosnia & Herzegovina during childhood, as well as the serum of their children.
Molecular analyses of differentially expressed microRNAs across these samples indicate a conserved molecular signature involving cholesterol signaling and associated microRNAs in the biological embedding and potential transmission of childhood trauma symptoms. Critically, cross-injection studies of lipid messengers, as well as embryonic microinjections of specific miRNAs in mice provide ‘proof of concept’ evidence supporting their role in intergenerational transmission of trauma effects.

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Ali Jawaid, MD, PhD is a physician-scientist with training in both clinical and basic neuroscience. He is a Principal Research Investigator at the Research Network Łukasiewicz – PORT Polish Center for Technology Development. He completed his medical studies from Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan, and followed by a fellowship in Neuropsychiatry from Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA. He then proceeded to complete an MD-PhD in Neuroscience from Switzerland (simultaneous PhD degrees awarded by UZH/ETH International Program in Neuroscience and UZH MD-PhD program in 2016) followed by a post-doc in Neuroepigenetics from ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Dr. Jawaid has been an independent group leader since late 2020 investigating the interplay of metabolic and epigenetic factors in the susceptibility to neuropsychiatric disorders across the lifespan and across generations. He has authored 80+ publications, including original studies in top-tier scientific journals, such as Nature Neuroscience, Neuron, Nature Communication, EMBO Journal, and Translational Psychiatry and has a current H-index of 32.

Dr. Ali Jawaid is a scholar of the FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence, a platform of 30 outstanding Neuroscientists in Europe under the patronage of the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies. He is a fiction author, poet, and virtual-reality enthusiast outside of scientific work.