Altered gene expression in the hippocampus of young adult female mice by early protein malnutrition

OCTAVIO GIANATIEMPO ; CAROLINA ALBERCA ; MARIELA CHERTOFF; NICOLÁS PREGI ; EDUARDO T. CÁNEPA

Mar del Plata

Congreso; XXXII Congreso Anual SAN 2017; 2017

Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurosciencias

Early life nutrition plays a key role in central nervous system development. An adequate dietary protein content appears to be critical for the development of neurological functions. To study the impact of perinatal protein restriction, we fed mice with a low protein diet (LP, 8% casein) or a control diet (NP, 20% casein) during pregnancy and lactation. These mice constituted the F0 and were the only ones exposed to the treatment diet, their offspring after weaning (F1) was fed with standard diet. Previous work in this model has shown a detrimental effect on maternal behavior of F0 and F1 LP mice and spatial and working memory deficits in LP offspring. In consequence, we have focused on studying the expression of genes related to memory formation, such as immediate-early genes; and genes relevant for the adaptation to environmental stress, for example the glucocorticoid receptor gene. In this work, we show that in 8-week-old female offspring hippocampus there is a significant decrease in Egr1, Arc, Fos, Nr3c1 and Ppp1r3c mRNA levels, as well as a strong tendency for Bdnf transcript variant 4 and Fosb expression decrease. This set of genes has been shown to be affected in several models where deficits in memory tasks and maternal behavior are observed, suggesting that the altered expression profile that is present in our model might be mediating the behavioral effects observed in previous studies.