School of Agriculture and Food Science, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland.
Departamento de Reproducción Animal, Instituto Nacional de Investigación y Tecnología Agraria y Alimentaria, Madrid, Spain.
Biol Reprod. 2023 Nov 15;109(5):749-758. doi: 10.1093/biolre/ioad103.
Harnessing information from the maternal blood to predict fetal growth is attractive yet scarcely explored in livestock. The objectives were to determine the transcriptomic modifications in maternal blood and fetal liver, gonads, and heart according to fetal weight and to model a molecular signature based on the fetal organs allowing the prediction of fetal weight from the maternal blood transcriptome in cattle. In addition to a contemporaneous maternal blood sample, organ samples were collected from 10 male fetuses at 42 days of gestation for RNA-sequencing. Fetal weight ranged from 1.25 to 1.69 g (mean = 1.44 ± 0.15 g). Clustering data analysis revealed clusters of co-expressed genes positively correlated with fetal weight and enriching ontological terms biologically relevant for the organ. For the heart, the 1346 co-expressed genes were involved in energy generation and protein synthesis. For the gonads, the 1042 co-expressed genes enriched seminiferous tubule development. The 459 co-expressed genes identified in the liver were associated with lipid synthesis and metabolism. Finally, the cluster of 571 co-expressed genes determined in maternal blood enriched oxidative phosphorylation and thermogenesis. Next, data from the fetal organs were used to train a regression model of fetal weight, which was predicted with the maternal blood data. The best prediction was achieved when the model was trained with 35 co-expressed genes overlapping between heart and maternal blood (root-mean-square error = 0.04, R2 = 0.93). In conclusion, linking transcriptomic information from maternal blood with that from the fetal heart unveiled maternal blood as a predictor of fetal development.
利用母体血液中的信息来预测胎儿生长在畜牧业中很有吸引力，但研究甚少。本研究旨在确定根据胎儿体重，母体血液和胎儿肝脏、性腺和心脏中转录组的修饰，并构建基于允许从牛的母体血液转录组预测胎儿体重的胎儿器官的分子特征模型。除了同时采集的母体血液样本外，还从 10 只 42 天妊娠的雄性胎儿中采集了器官样本进行 RNA 测序。胎儿体重范围为 1.25 至 1.69 克（平均值为 1.44±0.15 克）。聚类数据分析显示，与胎儿体重呈正相关且富含与器官生物学相关的本体论术语的共表达基因簇。对于心脏，1346 个共表达基因参与了能量生成和蛋白质合成。对于性腺，1042 个共表达基因富集了生精小管发育。肝脏中鉴定出的 459 个共表达基因与脂质合成和代谢有关。最后，在母体血液中确定的 571 个共表达基因簇富集了氧化磷酸化和产热。接下来，使用来自胎儿器官的数据来训练胎儿体重的回归模型，并使用母体血液数据预测该模型。当模型使用心脏和母体血液之间重叠的 35 个共表达基因进行训练时，预测效果最佳（均方根误差=0.04，R2=0.93）。总之，将母体血液中的转录组信息与胎儿心脏的转录组信息相联系，揭示了母体血液作为胎儿发育预测因子的潜力。
