Maternal High Fat Diet and Diabetes Disrupts Transcriptomic Pathways that Regulate Cardiac Metabolism and Cell Fate in Newborn Rat Hearts

Children born to diabetic and obese or overweight mothers have a higher risk of heart disease at birth and later in life. Our previous work using chromatin immunoprecipitation sequencing revealed that late-gestation diabetes in combination with maternal high fat diet causes a distinct fuel-mediated epigenetic reprogramming of cardiac tissue during fetal cardiogenesis. We used gene expression profiling to investigate the overall transcriptional signature of newborn rat offspring exposed to the combination of maternal diabetes and maternal high fat diet. Newborn rats, at postnatal day 1, were selected from different exposure groups for RNA extraction and hybridization on Rat Gene 1.0 ST Whole-transcript Affymetrix microarrays. Transcriptional signature from hearts of diabetes exposed, high fat diet exposed, diabetes + high fat diet exposed and control newborn rats was compared for differential transcriptome expression.