When a woman becomes pregnant she tends to take great care of everything she eats, leaving aside such unhealthy habits as smoking, drinking alcohol or eating foods rich in sugar and poor in nutrients. All for the baby’s sake.
Now, a new study carried out by the Gambia-based Medical Research Council Unit (Africa), the International Nutrition Group at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (UK), and a team of scientists from the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas (USA) has determined that a pregnant woman’s diet is key in a gene that influences the immune system and the risk of cancer for the child . The study has been published in the journal Genome Biology .
Subtle differences in our DNA can affect our risk of developing certain diseases. Thus, the baby’s DNA can be modified by a woman’s diet during pregnancy, not just before it, as previous studies had already shown. In the present work, the researchers have located a gene called VTRNA2-1 (which affects how the body responds to viral infections) that is particularly sensitive to these changes in diet.
Scientists studied the most frequently studied epigenetic modifications by chemical tags (methylation) in 120 pregnant women who conceived in The Gambia in both the rainy and dry seasons (which influence the food grown by this population) and measured the concentrations of nutrients. in the blood. This difference in diet according to the seasons provided a perfect example for the experiment.
“Our results show that the methylation marks that regulate how VTRNA2-1 is expressed are influenced by the season in which babies are conceived. Maternal nutrition is the most likely driver , ”adds Matt Silver, co-author of the study.
This study is the first to show that a mother’s diet before pregnancy can affect her child’s risk of disease by rewriting a small portion of her epigenome.
“As this gene plays a key role in controlling the response to viral infections and offering protection against certain types of cancer, the potential implications are enormous .” Our next step is to follow the Gambian children to test exactly how the differences in the epigenetic gene VTRNA2-1 affect gene expression and lifelong health ”, concludes Andrew Prentice, co-author of the study.
