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. 2020 Oct 15;10:17498. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-73867-7

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© The Author(s) 2020

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

PMC Copyright notice

Individual ‘dynamic’ sperm miRNA and tRNA, but not piRNA, are significantly correlated with perceived stress experience, potentially acting to influence the earliest stages of development to shape long-term health outcomes. (A) Summary of analysis results, including the class-specific numbers of consistently expressed (total) and ‘dynamic’ sperm sncRNA, and the number of ‘dynamic’ sncRNA with statistically significant associations with perceived stress experience. (B) Theoretical model linking a chain of events beginning with an environmental experience or exposure, including stress, impacting sperm sncRNA levels. Acting individually or interacting together as part of a broader sncRNA code, these ‘dynamic’ sncRNA are able to transmit the encoded information regarding the paternal environment to offspring, potentially impacting developmental processes (e.g., rates of fertility, embryo division and implantation). Even if the initial impact of these ‘dynamic’ sperm sncRNA was small (indicated by ⍺1 or ⍺2), consequent shifts in the timing of developmental windows of susceptibility to additional events could produce significant differences over time, either in positive (resilience, indicated in blue) or negative (risk, indicated in red) directions when compared to a typical developmental trajectory (as indicated in black).

Illustrations by Tim Phelps © 2020 JHU AAM.