Abstract
The pregnancy period and first days of a newborn’s life is an important time window to ensure a healthy development of the baby. This is also the time when the mother and her baby are exposed to the same environmental conditions and intake of nutrients, which can be determined by assessing the blood metabolome. For this purpose, dried blood spots (DBS) of newborns are a valuable sampling technique to characterize what happens during this important mother-child time window. We used metabolomics profiles from DBS of newborns (age 2–3 days) and maternal plasma samples at gestation week 24 and postpartum week 1 from mother-child pairs of the Copenhagen Prospective Studies on Asthma in Childhood 2010 (COPSAC) cohort, to study the vertical mother-child transfer of metabolites. Further, we investigated how persistent the metabolites are from the newborn and up to 6 months, 18 months, and 6 years of age. Two hundred seventy two metabolites from UPLC-MS (Ultra Performance Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry) analysis of DBS and maternal plasma were analyzed using correlation analysis. A total of 11 metabolites exhibited evidence of transfer (), including tryptophan betaine, ergothioneine, cotinine, theobromine, paraxanthine, and N6-methyllysine. Of these, 7 were also found to show persistence in their levels in the child from birth to age 6 years. In conclusion, this study documents vertical transfer of environmental and food-derived metabolites from mother to child and tracking of those metabolites through childhood, which may be of importance for the child’s later health and disease.
Highlights
The time during pregnancy, birth, and the first months of life is crucial for the child’s health and disease
98 compounds were found to have a unique match between metabolites detected in mothers and those in dried blood spots (DBS), while further 108 were annotated through manual annotation propagation through the Global Natural Products Social Molecular Networking Platform (GNPS) [13], resulting in a total of 272 annotated compounds (Table S3)
Using correlation analysis between three metabolomic profiles measured at gestational week 24, in the child at age 2–3 days and in the mother 1 week postpartum constituted a method for establishing which metabolites show evidence of vertical transfer
Summary
The time during pregnancy, birth, and the first months of life is crucial for the child’s health and disease. For a range of diseases, including asthma, allergy and eczema, predisposition by having a mother with the disease is much stronger than having a father with the same disease [10]. In early life the immune system undergoes maturation This is the period where the mother is in much more close contact with the child, from carrying the child during pregnancy to breast feeding postpartum, compared to the father. For all these reasons, scientific research is focusing on biochemical and biological processes in women and children during this important time window
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