An Emerging Role of micro-RNA in the Effect of the Endocrine Disruptors

Adel Derghal (1) , Mehdi Djelloul (2, 1) , Jérôme Trouslard (1) , Lourdes Mounien (1)

1 PPSN - Physiologie et physiopathologie du système nerveux somato-moteur et neurovégétatif
2 Cell Stem Cell Laboratory for CNS Disease Modeling

Endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) are diverse natural and synthetic ă chemicals that may alter various mechanisms of the endocrine system and ă produce adverse developmental, reproductive, metabolic, and neurological ă effects in both humans and wildlife. Research on EDCs has revealed that ă they use a variety of both nuclear receptor-mediated and ă non-receptor-mediated mechanisms to modulate different components of the ă endocrine system. The molecular mechanisms underlying the effects of ă EDCs are still under investigation. Interestingly, some of the effects ă of EDCs have been observed to pass on to subsequent unexposed ă generations, which can be explained by the gametic transmission of ă deregulated epigenetic marks. Epigenetics is the study of heritable ă changes in gene expression that occur without a change in the DNA ă sequence. Epigenetic mechanisms, including histone modifications, DNA ă methylation, and specific micro-RNAs (miRNAs) expression, have been ă proposed to mediate transgenerational transmission and can be triggered ă by environmental factors. MiRNAs are short non-coding RNA molecules that ă post-transcriptionally repress the expression of genes by binding to ă 3'-untranslated regions of the target mRNAs. Given that there is ă mounting evidence that miRNAs are regulated by hormones, then clearly it ă is important to investigate the potential for environmental EDCs to ă deregulate miRNA expression and action.

Mots clés: Micro-RNA; Endocrine disruptors; Environment

Domaines: Neurosciences [q-bio.NC]

Adel Derghal, Mehdi Djelloul, Jérôme Trouslard, Lourdes Mounien. An Emerging Role of micro-RNA in the Effect of the Endocrine Disruptors. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 2016, 10, ⟨10.3389/fnins.2016.00318⟩. ⟨hal-01471933⟩