Email

waterland@bcm.edu

Positions

Professor

Pediatrics-Nutrition
Baylor College of Medicine
Houston, TX US

Member

Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center
Baylor College of Medicine
Houston, Texas United States

Education

Postdoctoral Fellowship at Duke University

12/2003 - Durham, NC United States

Developmental Genetics

PhD from Cornell University

08/2000 - Ithaca, New York United States

Human Nutrition

BS from Virginia Tech

05/1987 - Blacksburg, Virginia United States

Physics

Professional Interests

• Environmental influences on mammalian developmental epigenetics

Professional Statement

Research in the Waterland laboratory aims to understand how nutrition and other environmental influences during prenatal and early postnatal development affect individual susceptibility to various diseases later in life. We are focused on nutritional influences on developmental epigenetics as a likely mediating mechanism.

Epigenetic mechanisms are established during development to stably regulate tissue-specific patterns of gene expression. DNA methylation is of particular interest because mammalian one-carbon metabolism, which supplies the methyl groups for DNA methylation, is intimately dependent on dietary methyl donors and cofactors.

We use various mouse models to investigate early nutritional influences on the developmental establishment of DNA methylation and associated phenotypes. We also use mouse models to explore the role of epigenetic dysregulation in obesity. For example, to understand how maternal obesity and nutrition before and during pregnancy affect developmental epigenetics in the hypothalamus and, consequently, body weight regulation in her offspring.

In recent years, a major focus is the identification and characterization of correlated regions of systemic interindividual epigenetic variation (CoRSIVs). We first reported these in the human genome in 2019, and provided independent validation in 2023. The systemic nature of interindividual epigenetic variation at CoRSIVs makes them amenable to population epigenetics and epigenetic epidemiology.

Our combined expertise in experimental epigenomics and computational biology (big data) allows us to make new biological discoveries from existing publicly available data and validate them experimentally.

Websites

Selected Publications

• Leroy JL, Frongillo EA, Dewan P, Black MM, Waterland RA "Can children catch up from the consequences of undernourishment? Evidence from child linear growth, developmental epigenetics, and brain neurocognitive development." Adv Nutrition. 2020 Jul 3;11(4):1032-1041. Pubmed PMID: 32584399
• Scott CA*, Duryea JD*, MacKay H, Baker MS, Laritsky E, Coarfa C, Waterland RA "Identification of cell type-specific methylation signals in bulk whole-genome bisulfite sequencing data." Genome Biol. 2020 Jul 1;21(1):156.
• Li G, Petkova TD, Laritsky E, Kessler N, Baker MS, Zhu S, Waterland RA "Early postnatal overnutrition accelerates aging-associated epigenetic drift in pancreatic islets." Environ Epigenet. 2019 Aug 25;25(5(3)):dvz015. Pubmed PMID: 31528363
• Gunasekara CJ, Scott CA, Laritsky E, Baker MS, MacKay H, Duryea JD, Kessler NJ, Hellenthal H, Wood AC, Hodges KR, Gandhi M, Hair AB, Silver MJ, Moore SE, Prentice AM, Li Y, Chen R, Coarfa C, Waterland RA "A genomic atlas of systemic interindividual epigenetic variation in humans." Genome Biol. 2019 Jun 3;20:105. Pubmed PMID: 31155008