This communication (e-poster) was presented at the European Congress of Endocrinology 2021 (ECE2021), an international scientific forum of the European Society of Endocrinology. The work, signed by the Spanish research group on gender incongruence (Rosa Fernández, Karla Ramírez, Enrique Delgado-Zayas, Eduardo Pásaro, of the University of A Coruña; and Antonio Guillamón, of the UNED, together with collaborators from Ghent University, Belgium), addresses the complex origin of gender incongruence.
What was reported
The authors propose that gender incongruence has a multifactorial origin involving neurological, hormonal and genetic factors. One of the central hypotheses is that it could be related to a sexual differentiation of the brain that is not concordant with gonadal sex.
Methylation data presented
In the e-poster, DNA methylation in blood was compared between 16 transgender people and 16 cisgender people of the same geographical origin, ethnicity and sex, using the Infinium Human Methylation 850K BeadChip platform. Significant differences were found in 71,515 CpGs (FDR p<0.05; 28.5% in CpG islands). When comparing cisgender men with transgender women, 20 differentially methylated CpG islands were identified, with genes such as WDR45B, SLC6A20, NHLH1, UBALD1 and PLEKHA5 standing out.
These methylation results provide evidence on the possible involvement of epigenetic regulation of the genome in the biological basis of gender incongruence, a line that the same group later developed in its publications on whole-genome methylation.
Bibliographic reference: Fernández R, Collet S, Ramirez K, Kiyar M, Delgado-Zayas E, T’sjoen G, Guillamón A, Mueller SC, Pásaro E. The (epi)genetic basis of gender incongruence. Endocrine Abstracts (2021) 73 AEP451. DOI: 10.1530/endoabs.73.AEP451
Read the publication: Abstract in Endocrine Abstracts (ECE2021)
