Paternal sperm epigenetics emerge as key factor in early pregnancy loss

For generations, the mystery of early pregnancy loss has been written almost entirely in the language of the mother's body — yet more than half of all human conceptions never reach birth, and the father's contribution to that silence has gone largely unexamined. Lacey Luense and her colleagues at Texas A&M are now turning that gaze toward the sperm itself, asking whether epigenetic markings carried by the father — not mutations, but instructions about which genes speak and which stay quiet — might quietly shape, or unshape, the earliest moments of a new life. Funded by a $1.65 million NIH gran