429 Maternal rate of gain and one-carbon metabolites supplementation alters the gene expression profile of fetal brain during early gestation in beef heifers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Maternal nutritional plane during pregnancy may leave lifelong impacts on offspring in beef cattle. Given that, we hypothesized that the supplementation of one-carbon metabolites (OCM) during pregnancy would mitigate the negative effects of maternal rate of gain through brain gene expression regulation in early developing bovine fetuses. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effects of OCM supplementation and maternal rate of gain on gene expression in the developing fetal brain in gestating beef heifers. Herein, Angus crossbred heifers (n = 72, body weight = 406 ± 33 kg) were randomly assigned to 2 × 2 factorial arrangement of treatments with two levels of maternal rate of gain (CON, 0.60 kg/d; and RES, -0.23 kg/d) each with or without OCM supplementation (+OCM, and -OCM). Heifers were fed individually and were bred using female-sexed semen from a single sire. The OCM supplementation included rumen-protected choline (44.4 g/d) and methionine (7.4 g/d) in corn carrier fed daily and weekly injections of folate (320 mg) and vitamin B12 (20 mg). The -OCM heifers received the corn carrier and saline injections. The treatments started at the time of breeding and continued until d 63 of gestation when pregnant heifers (n = 29) were slaughtered to collect fetal brain tissues for RNA sequencing. The fetal brain phenotypic data were analyzed using MIXED procedures of SAS, indicating that restricted nutrition affected the fetal right hemisphere weight (P < 0.05), and there was a strong tendency for overall fetal brain weight (0.05 < P < 0.1) to be affected as well. Brain transcriptomics data were analyzed using STAR aligner and a total of 177 differentially expressed genes (DEGs, FDR < 0.05) were identified across all treatment comparisons using DESeq2. Most of the DEGs were either isoforms of spliceosomal non-coding RNAs or micro-RNAs (miRNAs) associated with biological processes (FDR < 0.1) like mRNA processing, cellular nitrogen metabolism, lipid metabolism, and post-transcriptional gene silencing. The key miRNAs upregulated in the brain tissue of restricted fetuses without OCM supplementation, bta-mir-2375, bta-mir-876, and bta-mir-196a-1, were found to be associated with early embryogenesis and essential cellular regulatory processes. Conversely, in restricted fetuses with OCM supplementation, upregulated miRNAs such as bta-mir-216b, bta-mir-2285dd, and bta-mir-1298 were linked to early embryonic development, muscular development, and lipid metabolism in cattle. Both phenotypic and transcriptomics data here revealed that the maternal rate of gain altered fetal brain development, with differences seemingly compensated by OCM supplementation. USDA is an equal opportunity provider and employer.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".