Peri-conceptional under-nutrition alters transcriptomic profile in the endometrium during the peri-implantation...

Female under-nutrition during early pregnancy may affect the physiological pattern of the transcriptomic profile in the endometrium. We aimed to determine if restricted diet applied to females during peri-conceptional period, that is, from the onset of the oestrus until day nine of pregnancy, alters transcriptomic profile in the endometrium during the peri-implantation period. The restricted diet gilts were fed forage, in which the dose of proteins and energy had been reduced by 30% compared to normal diet. Microarray analysis revealed that approximately 4% of transcripts, that is 1690 of 43803 probes from The Porcine (V2) Gene Expression Microarray 4 × 44 (Agilent Technologies, Santa Clara, CA, USA) were consistently altered (p ≤ .05) in the endometrium harvested from pigs fed restricted diet. In pigs fed restricted diet out of 1690 genes, 714 genes were upregulated and 976 genes were downregulated versus in pigs fed normal diet. From 1690 genes, 510 (30%) were genes with known biological functions in the KEGG database. The proportions of the differentially expressed transcripts were organized into six major categories and 39 subcategories containing 259 pathways associated with the differentially expressed genes. The largest amount of differentially expressed genes was involved in metabolism category. The most relevant genes were involved in gene ontology (GO) cellular component (CC) term. These findings suggest that females under-nutrition during peri-conceptional period may create changes in endometrial transcriptome during the peri-implantation period creating the potential changes in physiological functions of peri-implantation endometrium.