Mother vs. Father

Mother vs. Father 

By: Christian Roque 

When it comes to the battle between the sexes, it seems like females have won before the battle even started. As humans grow older, some end up getting diseases, disorders, and other long-term effect, positive and negative. With these long-term effects, there are also short-term effects that occur in our lives as well. It has just been recently studied that long-term effects actually come from the mother, while short-term effects come from the father. An article published by Scientific American explains how this came to be. 

The article states that a recent study published in The Conversation by senior author Arunas Radzvilavicius and co-author Andrew Pomiankowski found that the inheritance of mitochondrial genes come from the maternal mitochondria. Radzvilavicius found that females secrete enzymes that degrade the paternal mitochondrial genes while the sperm enters the egg. What he also found was that there are some paternal mitochondrial genes that are not degraded and are passed on to the offspring. Interestingly, he also found that in some organisms, the father himself destroys most of his mitochondria. 

Radzvilavicius stated that through mathematical model, he found that it is the maternal mitochondrial genes that focus on long-term effects, while paternal mitochondrial genes focus on the short-term effects. He says that it decreases harmful future mutations when destroying paternal mitochondria. So, while the males try to improve their offsprings short-term, the females try to free their offsprings from their paternal mitochondrial genes. 

This study is parallel to Dr. James Cheverud’s study in maternal genotypes affecting adult offsprings. In his study, he and his team focused on the lipid, obesity, and diabetes phenotypes in LGXSM recombinants. Not only did they find a correlation between the maternal genes and the offspring, but also the environment the mothers give their offspring affects them as well. His team did find, though, that with age the effects of maternity decreases. Radzvilavicius’ study can give Dr. Cheverud and his team some optimism with their idea that maternal effects are long-term. While Dr. Cheverud and his team did see that decrease, maybe they didn’t wait long enough for those long-term effects to kick in. Also, Radzvilivacius focused on mitochondrial genes, not the genes that affect lipid, obesity, and diabetes phenotypes. Both Dr. Cheverud and the study in Scientific American focus on maternal genetic affects on offspring, but they both still have much more to learn, and they can learn from each other in hopes of understanding how exactly our mothers’ genetics affect us long-term. 

Reference: 

Radzvilavicius, Arunas L. “It's Mostly Mothers Who Pass on Mitochondria.” Scientific American, The Conversation, 5 Nov. 2017, www.scientificamerican.com/article/it-rsquo-s-mostly-mothers-who-pass-on-mitochondria/.