Animal models suggest that stress-induced hormonal changes in the mother during pregnancy lead to enduring changes in the fetus and empirical links between prenatal maternal stress and negative child development have been discerned repeatedly in human studies. But the role of heritable personality traits has received little attention in the latter work. The goal of the current study was to inve...

The presence of fetal cells has been associated with both positive and negative effects on maternal health. These paradoxical effects may be due to the fact that maternal and offspring fitness interests are aligned in certain domains and conflicting in others, which may have led to the evolution of fetal microchimeric phenotypes that can manipulate maternal tissues. We use cooperation and confl...

During late fetal and early neonatal life, the maternal circadian system coordinates the timing of a circadian clock in the hypothalamic suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN) to the prevailing light-dark cycle. The role of the maternal SCN in the process of maternal coordination was investigated in rats. Complete lesions of the maternal SCN on day 7 of gestation disrupted rhythms of SCN glucose utilizat...

A successful pregnancy requires multiple adaptations in the mother's brain that serve to optimise foetal growth and development, protect the foetus from adverse prenatal programming and prevent premature delivery of the young. Pregnancy hormones induce, organise and maintain many of these adaptations. Steroid hormones play a critical role and of particular importance is the progesterone metabol...

Many genetic loci that result in lethality when mutated may also have an essential role in oogenesis. The maternal effects of EMS-induced zygotic lethal mutations at 48 loci were examined using the dominant female-sterile technique. Three categories of effects were found. In the first group (13 out of 48), no maternal effect was detected. The second set (20 out of 48) exhibited maternal effects...

Background: Maternal RNAs play a critical role in early development. Variation in the diversity and levels of maternally derived gene transcripts may be central to the origin of phenotypic novelty – a longstanding problem in evolution and development. By studying maternal transcriptomes within and between divergent species, a better understanding of the evolutionary forces acting on maternal RN...

Since the excretion of potentially toxic cholephilic organic anions (COAs) produced by the fetus, such as bile acids and biliary pigments, cannot be performed by the fetal liver alone, the placenta and the maternal liver must play a key role collaborating in this function. COAs are transported across the plasma membranes of fetal and maternal hepatocytes and trophoblastic cells via similar carr...

Several saffron ecotypes (Mashhad, Torbat-Jam, Torbat-Haydarieh, Gonabad, Birjand, Ghaen) were evaluated in Urmia for stigma yield and yield components using different maternal corm weights(6, 8, 10, 12 g) in 2013 cropping year. The experiment was arranged as factorial based on randomized complete block design. Analysis of variance showed that there were significant differences among saffron ec...