Metabolism of Preimplantation Embryo Development: A Bystander or an Active Participant?

Unicellular organisms are exquisitely sensitive to nutrient availability in the environment and have evolved elaborate mechanisms to sense the levels and types of nutrients, altering gene expression patterns accordingly to adjust the metabolic activities required to survive. Thus, environmental cues induce adaptive metabolic differentiation through transcriptional and posttranscriptional changes. Similarly, preimplantation embryos are exposed to various environmental cues within the maternal reproductive tract prior to implantation. Because only "simple" culture conditions are required, it is assumed that these embryos are genetically preprogrammed to develop with little influence from the environment, with the exception of few "necessities" provided by the environment. However, a wealth of literature now suggests that the developing embryos are greatly influenced by the maternal environment. Even though the developing embryos have the capacity and plasticity to deal with nutritional imbalance posed by an altered maternal environment, there is often a trade-off to the overall fitness of those embryos later in life. Despite these studies that underline the general importance of the reproductive environment during development, it is thought that the primary driver of mammalian development is strictly genetic and that metabolic adaptation by the preimplantation embryo is secondary to genetic control. In this review, I propose that not only does the maternal environment of developing preimplantation embryos influence developmental potential, pregnancy outcomes, and postnatal disease states, but that it has an active role in induction and potentiation of the first differentiation event, the production of trophectoderm and inner cell mass lineages.