Maternal dietary folic acid induced DNA methylation changes at single base resolution in C57BL/6J mice offspring brain cerebral hemispheres. Mus musculus strain:C57BL/6J

The objective of this study was to ascertain whether the amount of ingested maternal folic acid (FA) during gestation impacted DNA methylation in the offspring’s cerebral hemispheres. FA is prescribed prior to and during pregnancy to prevent occurrence of neural tube defects in newborns. FA acts as cofactor in enzymes that mediate one-carbon metabolism, and can potentially modulate epigenetic methylation of cytosine residues in gene promoter regions. Such altered promoter region methylation can impact expression of genes, and thus could affect development. Any impact of FA on cytosine methylation in genomic DNA sequence is currently unknown, and our study is to fill this gap in information. We used groups of C57BL/6 J female mice that received amino acid based diets containing different amounts of FA for the entire duration of pregnancy. To understand the dynamics of DNA methylation, genomic DNA from the cerebral hemispheres of the offspring was isolated, and high-resolution, single-base resolution DNA methylation profiling was performed by using next-generation Illumina (Illumina Inc., San Diego, CA, USA) sequencing.