Reply to 'Fetal side' of the placenta: Anatomical mis-annotation of carbon particle 'transfer' across the human placenta.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Bongaerts E
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8642552 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Similar Datasets
Project description: Not available
| S-EPMC8642423 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Particle transfer across the placenta has been suggested but to date, no direct evidence in real-life, human context exists. Here we report the presence of black carbon (BC) particles as part of combustion-derived particulate matter in human placentae using white-light generation under femtosecond pulsed illumination. BC is identified in all screened placentae, with an average (SD) particle count of 0.95 × 104 (0.66 × 104) and 2.09 × 104 (0.9 × 104) particles per mm3 for low and high exposed mothers, respectively. Furthermore, the placental BC load is positively associated with mothers' residential BC exposure during pregnancy (0.63-2.42 µg per m3). Our finding that BC particles accumulate on the fetal side of the placenta suggests that ambient particulates could be transported towards the fetus and represents a potential mechanism explaining the detrimental health effects of pollution from early life onwards.
| S-EPMC6748955 | biostudies-literature
Project description: Not available
| S-EPMC4444809 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Cholesterol is indispensable for cellular membrane composition and function. It is also a precursor for the synthesis of steroid hormones, which promote, among others, the maturation of fetal organs. A role of the ATP-binding-cassette-transporter-A1 (ABCA1) in the transport of maternal cholesterol to the fetus was suggested by transferring cholesterol to apolipoprotein-A-1 (apo-A1), but the directionality of the apoA-1/ABCA1-dependent cholesterol transport remains unclear. We isolated primary trophoblasts from term placentae to test the hypotheses that (1) apoA-1/ABCA1 dispatches cholesterol mainly towards the fetus to support fetal developmental maturation at term, and (2) differentiated syncytiotrophoblasts (STB) exert higher cholesterol transport activity than undifferentiated cytotrophoblasts (CTB). As experimental models, we used (1) trophoblast monolayers grown on Transwell® system consisting of apical (maternal-like) and basal (fetal-like) compartments, and (2) trophoblasts grown on conventional culture plates at CTB and STB stages. Surprisingly, apoA-1-mediated cholesterol efflux operated almost exclusively at the apical-maternal side, where ABCA1 was also localized by immunofluorescence. We found greater cholesterol efflux capacity in STB, which was increased by liver-X-receptor agonist treatment and decreased by ABCA1 inhibition. We conclude that at term the apoA-1/ABCA1 pathway is rather involved in cholesterol transport to the mother than in transfer to the fully developed fetus.
| S-EPMC6121295 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The mechanisms for provisioning maternal resources to offspring in placental mammals involve complex interactions between maternally regulated and fetally regulated gene networks in the placenta, a tissue that is derived from the zygote and therefore of fetal origin. Here we describe a novel use of an embryo transfer system in mice to identify gene networks in the placenta that are regulated by the mother. Mouse embryos from the same strain of inbred mice were transferred into a surrogate mother either of the same strain or from a different strain, allowing maternal and fetal effects on the placenta to be separated. After correction for sex and litter size, maternal strain overrode fetal strain as the key determinant of fetal weight (P < 0.0001). Computational filtering of the placental transcriptome revealed a group of 81 genes whose expression was solely dependent on the maternal strain [P < 0.05, false discovery rate (FDR) < 0.10]. Network analysis of this group of genes yielded highest statistical significance for pathways involved in the regulation of cell growth (such as insulin-like growth factors) as well as those involved in regulating lipid metabolism [such as the low-density lipoprotein receptor-related protein 1 (LRP1), LDL, and HDL], both of which are known to play a role in fetal development. This novel technique may be generally applied to identify regulatory networks involved in maternal-fetal interaction and eventually help identify molecular targets in disorders of fetal growth.
| S-EPMC3092334 | biostudies-literature
Project description: Not available
| S-EPMC8346504 | biostudies-literature
Project description:PurposeThe placenta is a vital organ for the exchange of oxygen, nutrients, and waste products between fetus and mother. The placenta may suffer from several pathologies, which affect this fetal-maternal exchange, thus the flow properties of the placenta are of interest in determining the course of pregnancy. In this work, we propose a new multiparametric model for placental tissue signal in MRI.MethodsWe describe a method that separates fetal and maternal flow characteristics of the placenta using a 3-compartment model comprising fast and slowly circulating fluid pools, and a tissue pool is fitted to overlapping multiecho T2 relaxometry and diffusion MRI with low b-values. We implemented the combined model and acquisition on a standard 1.5 Tesla clinical system with acquisition taking less than 20 minutes.ResultsWe apply this combined acquisition in 6 control singleton placentas. Mean myometrial T2 relaxation time was 123.63 (±6.71) ms. Mean T2 relaxation time of maternal blood was 202.17 (±92.98) ms. In the placenta, mean T2 relaxation time of the fetal blood component was 144.89 (±54.42) ms. Mean ratio of maternal to fetal blood volume was 1.16 (±0.6), and mean fetal blood saturation was 72.93 (±20.11)% across all 6 cases.ConclusionThe novel acquisition in this work allows the measurement of histologically relevant physical parameters, such as the relative proportions of vascular spaces. In the placenta, this may help us to better understand the physiological properties of the tissue in disease.
| S-EPMC6282748 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The non-canonical NF-κB signaling may be a central integrator of a placental clock that governs the length of human pregnancy. We sought to identify fetal signals that could activate this NF-κB pathway in the placenta, and in turn, contribute to the onset of labor. Proteomics analysis of exosomes purified from fetal cord arterial blood revealed a total of 328 proteins, among which 48 were more significantly abundant (p < 0.01) in samples from women who delivered following elective Cesarean-section at term (39 to 40 weeks of estimated gestational age, EGA) compared to those who had elective Cesarean deliveries near term (35 to 36 weeks of EGA). Computational, crystal structural, and gene functional analyses showed that one of these 48 proteins, C4BPA, binds to CD40 of placental villous trophoblast to activate p100 processing to p52, and in turn, pro-labor genes. These results suggest that fetal C4BPA-induced activation of non-canonical NF-κB in human placenta may play a critical role in processes of term or preterm labor.
| S-EPMC6445281 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Gold-standard annotated corpora have become important resources for the training and testing of natural-language-processing (NLP) systems designed to support biocuration efforts, and ontologies are increasingly used to facilitate curational consistency and semantic integration across disparate resources. Bringing together the respective power of these, the Colorado Richly Annotated Full-Text (CRAFT) Corpus, a collection of full-length, open-access biomedical journal articles with extensive manually created syntactic, formatting and semantic markup, was previously created and released. This initial public release has already been used in multiple projects to drive development of systems focused on a variety of biocuration, search, visualization, and semantic and syntactic NLP tasks. Building on its demonstrated utility, we have expanded the CRAFT Corpus with a large set of manually created semantic annotations relying on Uberon, an ontology representing anatomical entities and life-cycle stages of multicellular organisms across species as well as types of multicellular organisms defined in terms of life-cycle stage and sexual characteristics. This newly created set of annotations, which has been added for v2.1 of the corpus, is by far the largest publicly available collection of gold-standard anatomical markup and is the first large-scale effort at manual markup of biomedical text relying on the entirety of an anatomical terminology, as opposed to annotation with a small number of high-level anatomical categories, as performed in previous corpora. In addition to presenting and discussing this newly available resource, we apply it to provide a performance baseline for the automatic annotation of anatomical concepts in biomedical text using a prominent concept recognition system. The full corpus, released with a CC BY 3.0 license, may be downloaded from http://bionlp-corpora.sourceforge.net/CRAFT/index.shtml. Database URL: http://bionlp-corpora.sourceforge.net/CRAFT/index.shtml.
| S-EPMC7243923 | biostudies-literature
Project description:To study the shape of objects using geometric morphometrics, landmarks are oftentimes collected digitally from a 3D scanned model. The expert may annotate landmarks using software that visualizes the 3D model on a flat screen, and interaction is achieved with a mouse and a keyboard. However, landmark annotation of a 3D model on a 2D display is a tedious process and potentially introduces error due to the perception and interaction limitations of the flat interface. In addition, digital landmark placement can be more time-consuming than direct annotation on the physical object using a tactile digitizer arm. Since virtual reality (VR) is designed to more closely resemble the real world, we present a VR prototype for annotating landmarks on 3D models. We study the impact of VR on annotation performance by comparing our VR prototype to Stratovan Checkpoint, a commonly used commercial desktop software. We use an experimental setup, where four operators placed six landmarks on six grey seal (Halichoerus grypus) skulls in six trials for both systems. This enables us to investigate multiple sources of measurement error. We analyse both for the configuration and for single landmarks. Our analysis shows that annotation in VR is a promising alternative to desktop annotation. We find that annotation precision is comparable between the two systems, with VR being significantly more precise for one of the landmarks. We do not find evidence that annotation in VR is faster than on the desktop, but it is accurate.
| S-EPMC8830334 | biostudies-literature