Periconceptional maternal and paternal alcohol consumption and embryonic and fetal development: the Rotterdam periconception cohort.

Research Question: What is the impact of maternal and paternal alcohol consumption in the periconception period on embryonic and fetal development assessed using three-dimensional ultrasound and virtual reality techniques?

Design: This prospective observational study was embedded in the Rotterdam periconception cohort (Predict study). Participating women received longitudinal three-dimensional transvaginal ultrasound examinations from week 7 to week 12 of gestation to measure crown-rump length and embryonic volume. Mid-pregnancy fetal size parameters and birth weight were retrieved from medical files.

Adults prenatally exposed to the Dutch Famine exhibit a metabolic signature associated with a broad spectrum of common diseases.

Background: Exposure to famine in the prenatal period is associated with an increased risk of metabolic disease, including obesity and type 2 diabetes. We employed nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) metabolomic profiling to identify the metabolic changes that are associated with survival of prenatal famine exposure during the Dutch Famine at the end of World War II and subsequently assess their link to disease.

Methods: NMR metabolomics data were generated from serum in 480 individuals prenatally exposed to famine (mean 58.

Accelerated biological aging six decades after prenatal famine exposure.

To test the hypothesis that early-life adversity accelerates the pace of biological aging, we analyzed data from the Dutch Hunger Winter Families Study (DHWFS, N = 951). DHWFS is a natural-experiment birth-cohort study of survivors of in-utero exposure to famine conditions caused by the German occupation of the Western Netherlands in Winter 1944 to 1945, matched controls, and their siblings. We conducted DNA methylation analysis of blood samples collected when the survivors were aged 58 to quantify biological aging using the DunedinPACE, GrimAge, and PhenoAge epigenetic clocks.

Adults prenatally exposed to the Dutch Famine exhibit a metabolic signature associated with a broad spectrum of common diseases.

Background: Exposure to famine in the prenatal period is associated with an increased risk of metabolic disease, including obesity and type-2 diabetes. We employed nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) metabolomic profiling to provide a deeper insight into the metabolic changes associated with survival of prenatal famine exposure during the Dutch Famine at the end of World War II and explore their link to disease.

Methods: NMR metabolomics data were generated from serum in 480 individuals prenatally exposed to famine (mean 58.

Diversity and Evolution of Frog Visual Opsins: Spectral Tuning and Adaptation to Distinct Light Environments.

Visual systems adapt to different light environments through several avenues including optical changes to the eye and neurological changes in how light signals are processed and interpreted. Spectral sensitivity can evolve via changes to visual pigments housed in the retinal photoreceptors through gene duplication and loss, differential and coexpression, and sequence evolution. Frogs provide an excellent, yet understudied, system for visual evolution research due to their diversity of ecologies (including biphasic aquatic-terrestrial life cycles) that we hypothesize imposed different selective pressures leading to adaptive evolution of the visual system, notably the opsins that encode the protein component of the visual pigments responsible for the first step in visual perception.