CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Prenatal stress effect on glutamate metabolism, evaluated with liquid cromatography-mass spectrometry. Ezequiela Adrover1, María Rosa Katunar1, Helle S. Waagepetersen2, Arne Schousboe2 y Marta C. Antonelli1. 1IQUIFIB (UBA-CONICET), Facultad de Farmacia y Bioquímica. UBA. Buenos Aires. Argentina. 2Faculty of Pharmaceutical SciencesUniversity of Copenhagen. Copenhagen. Denmark. Episodes of stress suffered by the mother during pregnancy generate changes in the fetal environment affecting central nervous system development of the offspring. Previous studies from our laboratory have shown that adult offspring of rats stressed during the last week of pregnancy exhibited higher levels of glutamate receptors than control rats concomitantly with a long-lasting astroglial reaction and a reduced dendritic arborization with synaptic loss in the brain of adult offsprings. Since metabolism of glutamate and GABA is intimately linked to a substrate cycle between neurons and sorrounding astroglia, our results prompted us to suggest that both glutamate and GABA neurotransmitter pathways might be impaired in the brain of a prenatally stressed rat. To study the effect of prenatal stress (PS) on the metabolism of glutamate, pregnant rats were subjected to restrain stress during the last week of gestation. Brain extracts of PS rats were evaluated by liquid chromatography and mass spectroscopy to measure the content of glutamate, GABA and others metabolites. This procedure was performed in frontal cortex and caudate putamen brain extracts of animals of 28 and 60 postnatal day (PND). Our results show that glutamate content in adult male (PND 60) PS rats is significantly reduced than in control rats. This would indicate that prenatal stress produces long-term changes in the metabolism and/or synthesis of glutamate thereby modulating the expression of glutamate receptors and altering the normal synaptic transmission of the adult brain.