Slimming is globally prevalent especially in young women, and it may contribute to the metabolic health of their offspring. Whereas some Lamarckian ideas about environmental inheritance have been dismissed, increasing evidence suggest that certain acquired traits can be transmitted to the next generation. It is therefore of great interest to determine how and to what extent a maternal lifestyle change contributes to their offspring. Here we show that enriched environment (EE) induced maternal slimming improves general health and reprograms metabolic gene expression in mice offspring. EE in mothers induced decreased body weight, adiposity, and improved glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity. Relative to controls, their offspring exhibited improved general health such as reduced fat accumulation, enhanced metabolic parameters as well as glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity. Maternal slimming altered the expression of 1,732 genes in the liver of offspring, with coherent downregulation of genes involved in lipid and cholesterol biosynthesis. Epigenomic profiling in offspring revealed numerous changes in cytosine methylation depending on maternal slimming, including hypermethylation of several genes involved in lipid biosynthesis, correlated with the downregulation of these genes. Maternal slimming also altered overall transcriptome patterns in mature oocytes, which contributes largely to the metabolic health and gene expression patterns in offspring. Overall, our studies suggest that maternal slimming have a beneficial role in regulating metabolic profiles in offspring, implying that it might be considered as a potential strategy to reverse the global prevalence of obesity and related metabolic syndromes.
Overall design: Female F0 founders were raised on a standard diet in a normal cage until 12 weeks of age, at which point they were placed into the enriched environmental cage or stayed in the normal cage (chosen at random) for 4 weeks. Males were always raised on a standard diet in the standard cage. At 16 weeks, female F0 founders were mated with males in standard conditions. After 1 or 2 days, males were removed, and pregnant females were left alone with a standard diet in the standard cage until their litters were 3 weeks of age. Note that we always used virgin males to avoid confounding effects brought about by the males. Moreover, males mated with two female groups did not differ in phenotypic data (body weight, adiposity, fasting blood glucose and insulin levels). At 3 weeks of age, partial offspring were sacrificed and the median lobe of liver was rapidly dissected out and flash-frozen in liquid N2, each from an independent mother. Samples from five control and four slimming offspring, each from different mothers, were used for DNA extraction. The samples of DNA from the control or slimming group were pooled, and the pools were used for microarray analysis.
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