GELIFES Seminars - Sin-Yeon Kim

Link to seminar

Sin-Yeon Kim (University of Vigo, Spain)

Maternal effect senescence and transgenerational effects in sticklebacks

It is now well known that increasing maternal age negatively affects not only performance of the mothers themselves, but also health, lifespan and fertility of their offspring in many animals, including humans. This is mainly due to ‘maternal effect senescence’, which evolves independently from reproductive senescence and affects the quality of offspring. However, its mechanisms remain largely unknown. My current research focuses on what molecular mechanisms mediate maternal effect senescence and whether this detrimental age effect is transmitted to more than one generation of progeny. I use the three-spined stickleback in my experimental studies. Three-spined sticklebacks in Spain have evolved to live fast and die young at the southern edge of the specie’s range. This allows me to explore maternal effect senescence by comparing maternal strategies and the consequences between young females and old females. In the next GELIFES seminar, I will talk about how maternal effects change with maternal age, how these affect offspring viability, behaviour and brain development, and how this maternal effect senescence affects grand-offspring. I will show how maternal effect senescence is related with mRNA transcripts of DNA repair genes and mtDNA copies transferred by mothers to their eggs. I will show that maternal age influences sperm telomere length of sons, thereby possibly affecting the viability of the next generation, too.

Biosketch:
Sin-Yeon Kim is a professor and researcher at the Marine Research Centre of the University of Vigo in Galicia, Spain. She is interested in the evolution of life histories and behaviours. Her principal research objective is understanding why individual animals grow, reproduce, age and behave differently from each other and how these variations are maintained through ecological and evolutionary mechanisms. All her current studies are based on experimental works using the three-spined stickleback and the yellow-legged gull.