Postnatal effects of maternal nutrition on growth, productivity, and reproduction of the offspring could have important implications in the livestock industry.
In a rat model of the in utero and postnatal effects of diesel exhaust on endometriosis, exposure to diesel exhaust enhanced persistence of endometriosis lesions, defined by persistence of surrounding collagen fibers (Umezawa et al. 2011).
Because the global Adamtsl2 inactivation leads to neonatal death, tissue specific conditional deletion will be required to determine postnatal effects of ADAMTSL2 deficiency on limbs, heart valves and skin.
Next to the evidence for a postnatal effect of parental psychopathology on child development, there are also several reports suggesting a direct relation between maternal stress during pregnancy, such as depression and anxiety, and child development [ 6].
Here, we combined a neonatal cross-fostering design with a mouse model of prenatal immune challenge induced by maternal gestational treatment with the viral mimetic poly(I C) to dissect the relative contribution of prenatal and postnatal maternal effects on the offspring.
More recent animal work has shown that maternally provided prenatal and postnatal environment effects on offspring may be mediated by non-inherited epigenetic mechanisms [ 30, 31].
The results of the reciprocal cross-fostering study reveal evidence for a postnatal, maternal effect on both lordosis and inter-intromission intervals (Fig. 1c).
In a European birth cohort we explored if weight, length or skinfold thicknesses differed at two years of age between children of mothers with high postnatal depression symptom scores and children of mothers with normal scores, and if postnatal depression had different effects on the lower and upper tails of the distribution of anthropometric measures.
Although the determinants of psychosexual gender identity are probably complex, it is clear that a testosterone surge that occurs in males during late foetal and early postnatal life has significant effects on regions of the brain that are strongly correlated with gender identity.
The persistence of elevated IGFBP2 in UN animals is therefore an abnormality that could have a wide range of effects on postnatal growth and organ development.
