AI Article Synopsis
- Epidemiological studies indicate that poor nutrition during pregnancy may heighten the risk of mental disorders like ADHD and autism, supported by animal experiments.
- Researchers used in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer in mice to investigate the effects of a protein-restricted diet during only the fetal stage, revealing behavioral differences in offspring related to fear, anxiety, and social behaviors.
- The findings suggest that maternal nutrition impacts the offspring's brain development and behavior through significant epigenetic changes, marking this study as groundbreaking in understanding maternal nutrition’s role using reproductive technology.
Article Abstract
Background: Epidemiological studies suggest that hyponutrition during the fetal period increases the risk of mental disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism-spectrum disorder, which has been experimentally supported using animal models. However, previous experimental hyponutrition or protein-restricted (PR) diets affected stages other than the fetal stage, such as formation of the egg before insemination, milk composition during lactation, and maternal nursing behavior.
Results: We conducted in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer in mice and allowed PR diet and folic acid-supplemented PR diet to affect only fetal environments. Comprehensive phenotyping of PR and control-diet progenies showed moderate differences in fear/anxiety-like, novelty-seeking, and prosocial behaviors, irrespective of folic-acid supplementation. Changes were also detected in gene expression and genomic methylation in the brain.
Conclusions: These results suggest that epigenetic factors in the embryo/fetus influence behavioral and epigenetic phenotypes of progenies. Significant epigenetic alterations in the brains of the progenies induced by the maternal-protein restriction were observed in the present study. To our knowledge, this is first study to evaluate the effect of maternal hyponutrition on behavioral phenotypes using reproductive technology.
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| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5248510 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12263-016-0550-2 | DOI Listing |
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