Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2023 May 22:11:1185311.
doi: 10.3389/fcell.2023.1185311. eCollection 2023.

DNA methylation dynamics during pregnancy

Delphine Fradin  1 , Jorg Tost  2 , Florence Busato  2 , Clémence Mille  1 , Fanny Lachaux  1 , Jean-François Deleuze  3 , Gisèle Apter  4 , Alexandra Benachi  5
Affiliations

DNA methylation dynamics during pregnancy

Delphine Fradin et al. Front Cell Dev Biol. .

Abstract

Pregnancy is a state of multiple physiological adaptations. Since methylation of DNA is an epigenetic mechanism that regulates gene expression and contributes to adaptive phenotypic variations, we investigated methylation changes in maternal blood of a longitudinal cohort of pregnant women from the first trimester of gestation to the third. Interestingly, during pregnancy, we found a gain of methylation in genes involved in morphogenesis, such as ezrin, while we identified a loss of methylation in genes promoting maternal-infant bonding (AVP and PPP1R1B). Together, our results provide insights into the biological mechanisms underlying physiological adaptations during pregnancy.

Keywords: DNA methylation; bonding; changes; immunity; pregnancy.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Differentially methylated CpGs between first and third trimesters. (A) Number of differentially methylated CpGs by genes. Blue represents the hypomethylated genes, while green represents the hypermethylated genes. (B) Distribution of differentially methylated CpGs versus all CpG sites on the EPIC array in relation to the CpG island annotation. (C) Distribution of differentially methylated CpGs versus all CpG sites on the EPIC array in relation to the nearest gene regions. ExonBnd, exon binding region; IGR, intergenic region; TSS200, 200 base pairs (bps) around the transcriptional start site; TSS1500, 1500 bps around the transcriptional start site. (D) Bubble diagram of Gene Ontology (GO) analysis of DMRs that gained methylation across pregnancy. (E) Bubble diagram of Gene Ontology (GO) analysis of DMRs that lose methylation during pregnancy. The Y-axis label represents the pathway, and the X-axis label represents the rich factor (rich factor = amount of differentially expressed genes enriched in the pathway/amount of all genes in the background gene set). Size and color of the bubble represent the amount of differentially expressed genes enriched in the pathway and enrichment significance, respectively. DEGs, differentially expressed genes; FDR, false discovery rate.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Aslibekyan S., Demerath E. W., Mendelson M., Zhi D., Guan W., Liang L., et al. (2015). Epigenome-wide study identifies novel methylation loci associated with body mass index and waist circumference. Obesity 23, 1493–1501. 10.1002/oby.21111 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Bjornsson H. T., Sigurdsson M. I., Fallin M. D., Irizarry R. A., Aspelund T., Cui H., et al. (2008). Intra-individual change over time in DNA methylation with familial clustering. JAMA 299, 2877–2883. [pii]. 10.1001/jama.299.24.2877 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Chen S., Mukherjee N., Janjanam V. D., Arshad S. H., Kurukulaaratchy R. J., Holloway J. W., et al. (2017). Consistency and variability of DNA methylation in women during puberty, young adulthood, and pregnancy. Genet. Epigenet 9, 1179237X17721540. 10.1177/1179237X17721540 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Demerath E. W., Guan W., Grove M. L., Aslibekyan S., Mendelson M., Zhou Y.-H., et al. (2015). Epigenome-wide association study (EWAS) of BMI, BMI change and waist circumference in African American adults identifies multiple replicated loci. Hum. Mol. Genet. 24, 4464–4479. 10.1093/hmg/ddv161 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Dick K. J., Nelson C. P., Tsaprouni L., Sandling J. K., Aissi D., Wahl S., et al. (2014). DNA methylation and body-mass index: A genome-wide analysis. Lancet 383, 1990–1998. 10.1016/S0140-6736(13)62674-4 - DOI - PubMed