In a preclinical model, researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine found that cytokines, which are proteins that control the immune response, circulating in maternal blood during pregnancy may help reduce the risk of psychiatric conditions in the offspring. This discovery is unexpected because the levels of circulating maternal cytokines are usually so low that they were not previously thought to have an impact on fetal brain development and offspring behavior.atric conditions. The results are unexpected since maternal cytokines in circulation are typically at such low levels that they were not previously thought to be involved in fetal brain development and the behavior of offspring.
The research, which was published online in Brain, Behavior, and Immunity on Feb. 29, revealed that cytokine XCL1, produced by maternal immune cells, can act as a pregnancy hormone and is necessary for the proper development of the placenta and male offspring fear behavior. These findings align with previous epidemiological studies that have indicated a connection between maternal infection and inflammation during pregnancy and the health of offspring.During the study, it was discovered that circulating XCL1 levels in mouse models typically remained low before pregnancy and throughout gestation, except for a brief increase and decrease in the middle period. Dr. Miklos Toth, a professor of pharmacology at Weill Cornell Medicine and the corresponding author, stated that this temporary rise is crucial for the proper development of the placenta and emotional behavior of the offspring. Dr. Rosa Chen, the first author, conducted the study as a graduate student in the Toth lab and collaborated with Dr. Heidi Stuhlmann, the acting chair of Biochemistry and also of Cell and Developmental Biology.The study was conducted by Dr. Gilles Laustsen, a researcher at the Institute for Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Murdoch University, and Dr. Maria Vittoria Micioni Di Bonaventura, a researcher in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Fermo. The study was published in the journal Science.abnormalities were seen when the cytokine spike was blocked, but these returned to normal by adulthood. This suggests that the anxious behavior of adult offspring could be linked to the proinflammatory state in early life caused by the absence of elevated XCL1.
Dr. Toth will investigate other chemokines that might affect placenta development and the emotional behavior of offspring. The team plans to work with researchers who have access to blood samples from pregnant women to determine if the level of XCL1, a protein also found in humans, corresponds to the findings in mouse models.
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