Overview
- Dr. Michael Golding at Texas A&M received a $2.9 million grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism Monday to expand mechanistic studies of paternal alcohol effects on offspring.
- The team hypothesizes that alcohol exposure before conception alters molecular signals in sperm without changing DNA and that those changes disrupt offspring mitochondria, which control cellular energy and aging.
- The new phase builds on earlier preclinical findings linking paternal drinking to fetal growth restriction and birth defects and shifts toward mapping the specific biochemical pathways involved.
- Researchers will test whether paternal drinking compounds the effects of maternal drinking, search for early‑warning biomarkers, and seek molecular targets that could guide future interventions for FASD.
- The project remains preclinical and hypothesis driven, with supporting human association studies cited but no proven causal link in people yet, and investigators plan later to apply the same framework to other environmental stressors such as microplastics.