Resilience to social stress coincides with functional DNA methylation of the Crf gene in adult mice.

Evan Elliott, Gili Ezra-Nevo, Limor Regev, Adi Neufeld-Cohen, Alon Chen

Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel.

Nature neuroscience 2010 Nov

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DNA methylation regulates gene transcription and has been suggested to encode psychopathologies derived from early life stress. We found that methylation regulated the expression of the Crf (also known as Crh) gene and that chronic social stress in adult mice induced long-term demethylation of this genomic region. Demethylation was observed only in the subset of defeated mice that displayed social avoidance and site-specific knockdown of Crf attenuated the stress-induced social avoidance.

Citation

Evan Elliott, Gili Ezra-Nevo, Limor Regev, Adi Neufeld-Cohen, Alon Chen. Resilience to social stress coincides with functional DNA methylation of the Crf gene in adult mice. Nature neuroscience. 2010 Nov;13(11):1351-3