Maternal immune activation alters placental histone-3 lysine-9 tri-methylation, offspring sensorimotor processing, and hypothalamic transposable element expression in a sex-specific manner.

ABSTRACT: Animal models of maternal immune activation (MIA) are central to identifying the biological mechanisms that underly the association between prenatal infection and neuropsychiatric disorder susceptibility. Many studies, however, have limited their scope to protein coding genes and their role in mediating this inherent risk, while much less attention has been directed towards exploring the roles of the epigenome and transposable elements (TEs). In Experiment 1, we demonstrate the ability of MIA to alter the chromatin landscape of the placenta. We induced MIA by injecting 200 μg/kg (i.p.) of lipopolysaccharide (LPS) on gestational day 15 in Sprague-Dawley rats. We found a sex-specific rearrangement of heterochromatin 24-h after exposure to MIA, as evidenced by an increase in histone-3 lysine-

SUBMITTER: DeRosa H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10149420 | biostudies-literature | 2023 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature