Burton
Laboratory

Maternal Effects on Metabolism and Host-Microbe Interactions

The Burton Lab has long been interested in how the environment impacts an individual’s physiology and disease susceptibility. Within this broad field, the lab focuses on understanding the molecular mechanisms that mediate two different types of environmental impacts on physiology — the impact of a mother’s environment on offspring physiology and the impact of the microbiome on physiology. Through a better understanding of these interactions, we aim to develop new ways to prevent or treat diverse human pathologies with a particular focus on metabolic diseases.

Maternal environment and its impact on offspring physiology

Adapting to environmental stress is fundamental to survival. Most organisms use dedicated stress signaling pathways to sense environmental challenges and mount tailored responses. For most of the 20^th century, it was believed that any tailored stress response elicited by such signaling pathways was confined to an individual and not passed from one generation to the next. To put it another way, each generation was thought to “reset” and start with a blank informational slate about current environmental conditions. However, there is growing evidence that some environmental information is transmitted across a generational boundary. For example, silk moths can sense summer temperatures >21°C and alter hormone signaling to oocytes, which in turn modifies future progeny metabolism in a way that protects the offspring from the onset of winter. Similar observations from diverse taxa (worms, flies, mice) support the hypothesis that animals — including mammals — can adaptively transmit certain types of information about the environment to their progeny without altering the offspring’s genome sequence.

Among the many different types of multigenerational adaptations to stress that have been reported to exist, my lab focuses on observations where maternal exposures to specific stresses leads to substantial (>two-fold) increases in offspring survival in response to the same stress. In many such cases, across diverse types of animals, these robust adaptations to stress appear to be transmittable via oocytes, like the silk moth example above. These similar findings across many different species have led my lab to hypothesize that oocytes have unique and evolutionarily conserved mechanisms to link a mother’s environment to programmed changes in offspring physiology. The long-term goal of my lab is to identify the mechanisms that exist in oocytes that can link a mother’s environment to robust and long-lasting changes in offspring physiology. We anticipate that similar effects not only exist in humans, but that our studies might explain why a mother’s environment has been linked to her offspring’s susceptibility to numerous different pathologies in human epidemiological studies.

Microbiome regulation of animal physiology

Bacteria present in a human’s gut microbiome can both promote and protect against numerous diseases. Despite these observations, studies of the molecular mechanisms by which bacteria affect physiology remain challenging in complex mammalian model microbiomes that comprise hundreds of different bacterial species. The costs of maintaining germ-free models and the difficulties of working with complex microbial communities have further complicated the use of high-throughput approaches to study host-microbe interactions in mammalian model systems.

The model animal C. elegans, by contrast, can easily and cheaply be grown in the presence of a single bacterial species. We are now using this advantage of C. elegans to rapidly profile how tens of thousands of different bacteria can affect animal physiology with a particular focus on their effects on models of human disease. This includes identifying new bacteria that modify animal physiology and identifying the mechanisms by which bacteria drive these effects. In the long-term, we anticipate that we can exploit the mechanisms by which bacteria modify animal physiology to treat human pathologies. In addition, we propose that our work will allow us to determine if similar bacterial mechanisms exist in the bacteria that colonize human microbiomes and potentially contribute to human disease susceptibility.

Nauta KM, Burton NO. 2025. H₂S regulation of a host–microbe interaction. Trend Microbiol.

Pender CL, Dishart JG, Gildea HK, Nauta KM, Page EM, Siddiqi TF, Cheung SS, Joe L, Burton NO, Dillin A. 2024. Perception of a pathogenic signature initiates intergenerational protection. Cell.

El Jarkass HT, Castelblanco S, Kaur M, Wan C, Ellis AE, Sheldon RD, Lien EC, Burton NO, Wright GD, Reinke AW. Pre-print. The Caenorhabditis elegans bacterial microbiome influences microsporidia infection through nutrient limitation and inhibiting parasite invasion. bioRxiv.

Willis AR, Zhao W, Sukhdeo R, Burton NO, Reinke AW. 2024. Parental dietary vitamin B12 causes intergenerational growth acceleration and protects offspring from pathogenic microsporidia and bacteria. iScience 27(7):110206.

Cooper JF, Nguyen K, Gates D, Wolfrum E, Capan C, Lee H, Williams D, Okoye C, Wojtovich AP, Burton NO. Preprint. Oocyte mitochondria link maternal environment to offspring phenotype. Res Sq.

Gómez-Escribano A, Mora-Martínez C, Roca M, Walker DS, Panadero J, Sequedo MD, Saini R, Knölker HJ, Blanca J, Burguera J, Lahoz A, Canizares J, Millán JM, Burton NO, Schafer WR, Vázquez-Manrique RP. 2023. Changes in lipid metabolism driven by steroid signalling in modulate proteostasis in C. elegans. EMBO Rep 24:e55556.

Burton NO. 2023. A mother to offspring metabolic link. Nat Cell Biol 25:1083–1084.

Lampersberger L, Conte F, Ghosh S, Xiao Y, Price J, Jordan D, Matus DQ, Sarkies P, Beli P, Miska EA, Burton NO. 2023. Loss of the E3 ubiquitin ligases UBR-5 or HECD-1 restores Caenorhabditis elegans development in the absence of SWI/SNF function. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 120(5):e2217992120 

Cooper JF, Wang X, Burton NO. 2022. Genetics: A cross-kingdom evolutionary handoff. Curr Biol 32(22):R1262–R1286.

Burton NO, Greer EL. 2022. Multigenerational epigenetic inheritance: Transmitting information across generations. Seminar Cell Develop Biol. 127:12-132.

Burton NO*, Willis A, Fisher K, Braukmann F, Price J, Stevens L, Baugh LR, Reinke AW, Miska EA. 2021. Intergenerational adaptations to stress are evolutionarily conserved, stress specific, and have deleterious trade-offs. eLife 10:e73425.
*Corresponding author

Chandrasekaran V*, Desai N*, Burton NO*, Yang H, Price, J, Miska EA#, Ramakrishnan V#. 2021. Visualising formation of the ribosomal active site in mitochondria. eLife 10:e68806.
*Equal contribution

 Burton NO*, Riccio C, Dallaire A, Price J, Jenkins B, Koulmann A, Miska EA. 2020. Cysteine synthases CYSL-1 and CYSL-2 mediate C. elegans heritable adaptation to P. vranovensis infection. Nat Commun 11:1741.
*Corresponding author

Escribano APG, Bono-Yague J, Roca M, Panadero J, Sequedo MD, Saini R, Knoelker HJ, Blanca JM, Burguera JA, Lahoz A, Canizares J, Millan JM, Burton NO, Vazquez-Manrique R. 2019. Multiple hormonal signalling pathways function cell-nonautonomously to control protein homeostasis in Caenorhabditis elegans. bioRxiv.

Burton NO*, Dwivedi VK, Burkhart KB, Kaplan REW, Baugh LR, and Horvitz HR*. 2018. Neurohormonal signalling via a cytosolic sulfotransferase controls insulin sensitivity of C. elegans. Nat Commun 9(1):5152.
*Co-corresponding author

Burton NO, Futura T, Webster AK, Kaplan REW, Baugh LR, Arur S, Horvitz HR. 2017. Insulin-like signalling to the maternal germline controls progeny response to osmotic stress. Nat Cell Biol 19(3):252–257.
Featured in: Kaneshiro KR and Strome S. 2017. Inheritance of protection from osmotic stress. Nat Cell Biol
Mushegian AA. 2017. An insulin-like message from mother. Sci Signal

Burton NO, Burkhart KB, Kennedy S. 2011. Nuclear RNAi maintains heritable gene silencing in C. elegans. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 108(49):19683–19688.

Guang S, Bochner AF, Burkhart KB, Burton NO, Pavelec DM, Kennedy S. 2010. Small regulatory RNAs inhibit RNA polymerase II during the elongation phase of transcription. Nature (7301):1097–1101.

Cortesio CL, Chan KT, Perrin BJ, Burton NO, Zhang S, Zhang ZY, Huttenlocher A. 2008. Calpain 2 and PTP1B function in a novel pathway with Src to regulate invadapodia dynamics and breast cancer cell invasion. J Cell Biol 180(5):957–971.

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