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Maternal Diet and Nutrient Requirements in Pregnancy and Breastfeeding. An Italian Consensus Document.
2016
The importance of lifestyle and dietary habits during pregnancy and breastfeeding, for health of mothers and their offspring, is widely supported by the most recent scientific literature. The consumption of a varied and balanced diet from the preconceptional period is essential to ensure both maternal well-being and pregnancy outcomes. However, the risk of inadequate intakes of specific micronutrients in pregnancy and lactation is high even in the most industrialized countries. This particularly applies to docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), iron, iodine, calcium, folic acid, and vitamin D, also in the Italian population. Moreover, the risk of not reaching the adequate nutrient supply is increased …
Elie Metchnikoff and the multidisciplinary link novelty among Zoology, Embryology and Innate Immunity
2018
Elie Metchnikoff was a Russian scientist known as the pioneer of innate immunity. In particular, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering the process of phagocytosis and its significance in the development and disease. Here, we endeavor to demonstrate the enduring fascination of his scientific research, in particular the experiment involving the first observation of a macrophage reaction in the sea star. This applies to both adult and larvae immunity studies. Recent work on sea star larval cellular immunity and adult immune systems using modern expansions of molecular and cellular techniques shows that it is a continually exciting research field that cannot just be consigned to histor…
2020
Aims: Current anti-hypertensive therapies cannot cure hypertension and a life-long medication is necessary. Maternal treatment may represent a promising strategy for hypertension treatment. We have previously shown that maternal treatment of spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR) with pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) leads to a persistent blood pressure reduction in the female offspring at age of 6-8 months. The underlying mechanisms include improved endothelial function resulting from long-lasting epigenetic changes. In the present study, we address the renal effects of maternal PETN treatment. Methods and Results: F0 parental SHR were fed with either normal chow or PETN-containing (1 g/…
DNA methylation links prenatal smoking exposure to later life health outcomes in offspring
2019
Background Maternal smoking during pregnancy is associated with adverse offspring health outcomes across their life course. We hypothesize that DNA methylation is a potential mediator of this relationship. Methods We examined the association of prenatal maternal smoking with offspring blood DNA methylation in 2821 individuals (age 16 to 48 years) from five prospective birth cohort studies and perform Mendelian randomization and mediation analyses to assess whether methylation markers have causal effects on disease outcomes in the offspring. Results We identify 69 differentially methylated CpGs in 36 genomic regions (P value < 1 × 10−7) associated with exposure to maternal smoking in adolesc…
MycoKey Round Table Discussions of Future Directions in Research on Chemical Detection Methods, Genetics and Biodiversity of Mycotoxins
2018
MycoKey, an EU-funded Horizon 2020 project, includes a series of “Roundtable Discussions” to gather information on trending research areas in the field of mycotoxicology. This paper includes summaries of the Roundtable Discussions on Chemical Detection and Monitoring of mycotoxins and on the role of genetics and biodiversity in mycotoxin production. Discussions were managed by using the nominal group discussion technique, which generates numerous ideas and provides a ranking for those identified as the most important. Four questions were posed for each research area, as well as two questions that were common to both discussions. Test kits, usually antibody based, were one major focus of the…
Nonlinear trade-offs allow the cooperation game to evolve from Prisoner's Dilemma to Snowdrift.
2017
[EN] The existence of cooperation, or the production of public goods, is an evolutionary problem. Cooperation is not favoured because the Prisoner s Dilemma (PD) game drives cooperators to extinction. We have re-analysed this problem by using RNA viruses to motivate a model for the evolution of cooperation. Gene products are the public goods and group size is the number of virions co-infecting the same host cell. Our results show that if the trade-off between replication and production of gene products is linear, PD is observed. However, if the trade-off is nonlinear, the viruses evolve into separate lineages of ultra-defectors and ultra-cooperators as group size is increased. The nonlinear…
Cancer: a disease at the crossroads of trade-offs
2017
11 pages; International audience; Central to evolutionary theory is the idea that living organisms face phenotypic and/or genetic trade-offs when allocating resources to competing life-history demands, such as growth, survival, and reproduction. These trade-offs are increasingly considered to be crucial to further our understanding of cancer. First, evidences suggest that neoplastic cells, as any living entities subject to natural selection, are governed by trade-offs such as between survival and proliferation. Second, selection might also have shaped trade-offs at the organismal level, especially regarding protective mechanisms against cancer. Cancer can also emerge as a consequence of add…
Gene expression changes after parental exposure to metals in the sea urchin affect timing of genetic programme of embryo development
2021
Simple Summary Intergenerational and transgenerational effects, in which exposure to stressors in a parental generation affects the phenotype of the offspring have been connected to anthropic impacts on biological systems. Therefore, environmental stress experienced inside a generation, particularly during gametogenesis, may lead to erroneous patterns in their offspring just emerging at early developmental stages. In this scenario, the sea urchin embryo represents a suitable model for integrating analyses of gene expression through embryogenesis with developmental alteration induced by environmental stressors. Herein we provide pieces of evidence for the alteration of the gene regulatory ne…
The marine activities performed within the TOMO-ETNA experiment
2016
<p>The TOMO-ETNA experiment was planned in order to obtain a detailed geological and structural model of the continental and oceanic crust beneath Mt. Etna volcano and northeastern Sicily up to the Aeolian Islands (southern Italy), by integrating data from active and passive refraction and reflection seismic methodologies, magnetic and gravity surveys. This paper focuses on the marine activities performed within the experiment, which have been carried out in the Ionian and Tyrrhenian Seas, during three multidisciplinary oceanographic cruises, involving three research vessels (“Sarmiento de Gamboa”, “Galatea” and “Aegaeo”) belonging to different countries and institutions. During the o…
Tolerance of whitefish (Coregonus lavaretus) early life stages to manganese sulfate is affected by the parents
2016
European whitefish (Coregonus lavaretus) embryos and larvae were exposed to 6 different manganese sulfate (MnSO4) concentrations from fertilization to the 3-d-old larvae. The fertilization success, offspring survival, larval growth, yolk consumption, embryonic and larval Mn tissue concentrations and transcript levels of detoxification-related genes were measured in the long-term incubation. Full factorial breeding design (4 females x 2 males) enabled examining the significance of both female and male effects, and female-male interactions in conjunction with the MnSO4 exposure on the observed endpoints. The MnSO4 exposure reduced the survival of the whitefish early life stages. Also the offs…