Juliana Ramos
Research Mentor(s): Brigid Gregg
Mentor Department: Pediatrics
Authors: Juliana Ramos, Brigid Gregg, Maggie Rabotnick
Session: Session 3 (11:00am – 11:50am)
Presentation Type: Poster 20
Abstract
Maternal glycemia is the blood sugar level of an expectant mother. This plays an important role in development and the health of a child. The mother’s body prepares for lactation during pregnancy and the blood sugar during pregnancy can have an influence on this process. A healthy mother supplies human milk with a different composition than a mother with diabetes. The composition is also different from a mother with an obese BMI. Specific milk components, such as their lipid profiles, can differ between mothers. The composition of milk can then play a role in how the infant cells grow. In the infant these differences have the potential to alter the differentiation of body systems important for metabolism, like fat cells (adipocytes). Differentiation is when a cell matures and becomes more specialized. Cell differentiation pathways are sensitive to changes that are presented by different milk composition profiles between mothers. By testing milk from mothers who we expect to have different composition (for example mothers with gestational diabetes versus mothers without diabetes), we will look at the terminal functions of the developing fat cells after differentiation. Further, by optimizing cell culture conditions, we will be able to model and then analyze how different conditions of human milk impact differentiation and overall preadipocyte cell development. With these experiments, we expect to see more fat cells after differentiation in samples with milk from mothers with gestational diabetes in comparison to samples of cells with milk from mothers without diabetes, indicating that human milk from mothers with gestational diabetes promotes the development of adipocytes.
