Maternal Western-style diet programs skeletal muscle gene expression in lean adolescent Japanese macaque offspring

Early-life exposure to maternal obesity or a maternal calorically dense Western-style diet (WSD) is strongly associated with a greater risk of metabolic diseases in offspring, most notably insulin resistance and metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD). Prior studies in our well-characterized Japanese macaque model demonstrated that offspring of dams fed a WSD, even when weaned onto a control (CTR) diet, had reductions in skeletal muscle mitochondrial metabolism and increased skeletal muscle insulin resistance compared to offspring of dams on CTR diet. In the current study, we employed a nested design to test for differences in gene expression in skeletal muscle from lean 3-year-old adolescent offspring from dams fed a maternal WSD in both the presence and absence of maternal obesity or lean dams fed a CTR diet. We included offspring weaned to both a WSD or CTR diet to further account for differences in response to post-weaning diet and interaction effects between diets. Overall, we found that a maternal WSD fed to dams during pregnancy and lactation was the principal driver of differential gene expression (DEG) in offspring muscle at this time point. We identified key gene pathways important in insulin signaling including PI3K-Akt and MAP-kinase, regulation of muscle regeneration, and transcription-translation feedback loops, in both male and female offspring. Muscle DEG showed no measurable difference between offspring of obese dams on WSD compared to those of lean dams fed WSD. A post-weaning WSD effected offspring transcription only in individuals from the maternal CTR diet group but not in maternal WSD group. Collectively, we identify that maternal diet composition has a significant and lasting impact on offspring muscle transcriptome and influences later transcriptional response to WSD in muscle, which may underlie the increased metabolic disease risk in offspring.