Excited to share our new publication @nature ! Thank you to everyone that contributed to this work. Geoffrey Pronovost, Elena Coley, @drake_dds, @pipethero.

Check it out here: https://rdcu.be/b7B5O 

Here's a thread on the summary of our findings:

We were interested in how the maternal gut microbiota could influence brain development, particularly during embryonic development. We found that if we take away the mom's gut bacteria the embryos have a different brain gene expression profile.

Some of these genes were important for axon formation. When we looked at the embryo brains we found that by taking the mom's gut bacteria it disrupts the formation of axons that project form the thalamus to the embryo.

These axons are important for relaying sensory information from the environment. So we tested whether these changes in the embryo brain could have long-term consequences. We saw that offspring from mother's lacking a gut microbiota during pregnancy had impairments in particular

sensory behaviors. We then asked how does the mom's gut microbiota do this? We hypothesized it was through the small molecules that are regulated by the microbiota. We found some interesting candidate metabolites that were decreased in mom's blood and in the fetal brain from

mothers that were missing a gut microbiota during pregnancy. When we supplemented these metabolites back into pregnant mice that lack a gut microbiota, we restored fetal brain levels of these metabolites and prevented the impairments in axon development and sensory behaviors.

Of note, this entire study was done in mice, so we don't know how these findings may apply to humans.

Also check out this nice news and views from @KiralyLab and @OfMiceAndMinds

Maternal microbes support fetal brain wiring https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02657-y