Postnatal maternal care moderates the effects of prenatal bisphenol exposure on offspring neurodevelopmental, behavioral, and transcriptomic outcomes.

Bisphenols (BP), including BPA and "BPA-free" structural analogs, are commonly used plasticizers that are present in many plastics and are known endocrine disrupting chemicals. Prenatal exposure to BPA has been associated with negative neurodevelopmental and behavioral outcomes in children and in rodent models. Prenatal BPA exposure has also been shown to impair postnatal maternal care provisioning, which can also affect offspring neurodevelopment and behavior.

Automated maternal behavior during early life in rodents (AMBER) pipeline.

Mother-infant interactions during the early postnatal period are critical for infant survival and the scaffolding of infant development. Rodent models are used extensively to understand how these early social experiences influence neurobiology across the lifespan. However, methods for measuring postnatal dam-pup interactions typically involve time-consuming manual scoring, vary widely between research groups, and produce low density data that limits downstream analytical applications.

Postnatal maternal care moderates the effects of prenatal bisphenol exposure on offspring neurodevelopmental, behavioral, and transcriptomic outcomes.

Bisphenols (BPs), including BPA and "BPA-free" structural analogs, are commonly used plasticizers that are present in many plastics and are known endocrine disrupting chemicals. Prenatal exposure to BPA has been associated with negative neurodevelopmental and behavioral outcomes in children and rodent models. Prenatal BPA exposure has also been shown to impair postnatal maternal care provisioning, which can also affect offspring neurodevelopment and behavior.

The contributions of parental lactation on offspring development: It's not udder nonsense!

The Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) hypothesis describes how maternal stress exposures experienced during critical periods of perinatal life are linked to altered developmental trajectories in offspring. Perinatal stress also induces changes in lactogenesis, milk volume, maternal care, and the nutritive and non-nutritive components of milk, affecting short and long-term developmental outcomes in offspring. For instance, selective early life stressors shape the contents of milk, including macro/micronutrients, immune components, microbiota, enzymes, hormones, milk-derived extracellular vesicles, and milk microRNAs.

B6D2F1 mice that retain sexual behavior long term after castration outperform those that cease in the radial arm maze.

In rodents, gonadal steroids play a critical yet variable role in behaviors such as social interaction and cognitive performance. Gonadal steroids organize sex differences observed in spatial working memory, while the absence of activational effects induced by castration generally impedes spatial learning and memory. Although male sexual behavior is typically inhibited following castration, a significant proportion of gonadectomized B6D2F1 hybrid males retains the complete repertoire of male reproductive behavior.

Psychiatric risk and resilience: Plasticity genes and positive mental health.

Objective: The at-risk mental state (ARMS) for psychosis has long played a key role in diathesis-stress models of schizophrenia. More recent studies, however, have called for extending the boundaries of the ARMS construct beyond attenuated psychosis in nonhelp-seeking samples to include not only other vulnerability indicators but also protective factors related to genotype, mental health, personality, and cognition.

Method: Accordingly, we assessed in a sample of 100 college students, the ARMS construct with the Brief Prodromal Questionnaire (PQ-B) for psychosis, in conjunction with measures of positive mental health, childhood adversity, psychiatric symptoms, personality traits, social cognition, and genetic variables derived from assays of the serotonin transporter (5-HTTLPR) and the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF).

In search of positive mental health: Personality profiles and genetic polymorphisms.

Individuals vary greatly in their mental health and these differences may play a critical role in stress resistance, risk reduction and illness recovery. Here we ask how these differences may be related to normal variation in personality and genotype. One hundred healthy college students completed measures of mental health (Mental Health Continuum-Short Form [MHC-SF]), personality (NEO Five Factor Inventory) and adverse childhood experiences.

Early experience alters developmental trajectory of central oxytocin systems involved in hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis regulation in Long-Evans rats.

Oxytocin is important for postnatal developmental experiences for mothers, infants, and transactions between them. Oxytocin is also implicated in adult affiliative behaviors, including social buffering of stress. There is evidence for connections between early life experience and adult oxytocin system functioning, but effects of early experience on behavioral, endocrine, and neurophysiological outcomes related to adult social buffering are not well explored.

Limited bedding and nesting material changes indices of cellular metabolism and behavioral thermal regulation in Long-Evans rats during the first two weeks of life.

A quality nest can buffer pups from the cold climate in typical laboratory housing by insulating them from cool ambient air and facilitating pup huddling during early life when many thermal regulation strategies are not yet developed. The limited nesting material (LBN) manipulation prevents the dam from constructing a quality nest. In the present study, we investigate whether LBN presents a thermal challenge to pups across the first two postnatal weeks.

Uncovering sources of maternal variability: Inherited and environmental contributions to maternal phenotype.

Intergenerational patterns of parental behavior, especially maternal behavior, have been observed across mammalian species including humans, non-human primates, and rodents. These patterns are largely experience-dependent as opposed to genetically induced, with experiences in early-life serving an essential role in directing maternal behavior expressed later in life. Environmental conditions can also alter maternal behavior with consequences for offspring neurodevelopment and interactions with the next generation.

Epigenetic Mechanisms of the Glucocorticoid Receptor.

The glucocorticoid receptor (GR) has been shown to be important for mediating cellular responses to stress and circulating glucocorticoids. Ligand-dependent transcriptional changes induced by GR are observed across numerous tissues. However, the mechanisms by which GR achieves cell and tissue-specific effects are less clear.

Risk and protective effects of serotonin and BDNF genes on stress-related adult psychiatric symptoms.

We focused on individual risk by examining childhood adversity and current psychiatric symptoms in a sample of 100 college students genotyped for both the serotonin transporter (5-HTTLPR) and the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). Naturally occurring allelic variation in 5-HTTLPR (short/long) and BDNF (valine/methionine) have been strongly implicated in stress-related psychiatric risk, but the combined effects of these alleles on psychological functioning have yet to be fully elucidated. Univariate analysis revealed gene-environment correlations linking heightened psychiatric risk with past childhood adversity for short but not long 5-HTTLPR allelic carriers and for valine (Val) but not methionine (Met) BDNF allelic carriers.

Seeing a Face in a Crowd of Emotional Voices: Changes in Perception and Cortisol in Response to Emotional Information across the Senses.

One source of information we glean from everyday experience, which guides social interaction, is assessing the emotional state of others. Emotional state can be expressed through several modalities: body posture or movements, body odor, touch, facial expression, or the intonation in a voice. Much research has examined emotional processing within one sensory modality or the transfer of emotional processing from one modality to another.

Maternal hair cortisol levels as a novel predictor of neonatal abstinence syndrome severity: A pilot feasibility study.

Neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS) after in-utero opioid exposure remains a poorly understood condition with multiple factors contributing to severity. Exposure to maternal stress may be one contributing factor. Hair cortisol measurement represents a novel technique for assessing prenatal stress.

Early life exposures, neurodevelopmental disorders, and transposable elements.

Transposable elements make up a much larger portion of the genome than protein-coding genes, yet we know relatively little about their function in the human genome. However, we are beginning to more fully understand their role in brain development, neuroinflammation, and adaptation to environmental insults such as stress. For instance, glucocorticoid receptor activation regulates transposable elements in the brain following acute stress.

Peripubertal gonadal steroids are necessary for steroid-independent male sexual behavior in castrated B6D2F1 male mice.

Gonadal steroids play an integral role in male sexual behavior, and in most rodent models, this relationship is tightly coupled. However, many other species, including humans, continue to demonstrate male sex behavior in the absence of gonadal steroids, and the mechanisms that regulate steroid-independent male sex behavior are not well understood. Approximately 30% of castrated male B6D2F1 hybrid mice display male sex behavior many months after castration, allowing for the investigation of individual variation in steroidal regulation of male sex behavior.

Stress and glucocorticoid receptor regulation of mitochondrial gene expression.

Glucocorticoids have long been recognized for their role in regulating the availability of energetic resources, particularly during stress. Furthermore, bidirectional connections between glucocorticoids and the physiology and function of mitochondria have been discovered over the years. However, the precise mechanisms by which glucocorticoids act on mitochondria have only recently been explored.

Toxic stress history and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis function in a social stress task: Genetic and epigenetic factors.

Histories of early life stress (ELS) or social discrimination can reach levels of severity characterized as toxic to mental and physical health. Such toxic social stress during development has been linked to altered acute hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) response to social stress in adulthood. However, there are important individual differences in the size and direction of these effects.

The dynamic genome: transposons and environmental adaptation in the nervous system.

Classically thought as genomic clutter, the functional significance of transposable elements (TEs) has only recently become a focus of attention in neuroscience. Increasingly, studies have demonstrated that the brain seems to have more retrotransposition and TE transcription relative to other somatic tissues, suggesting a unique role for TEs in the central nervous system. TE expression and transposition also appear to vary by brain region and change in response to environmental stimuli such as stress.