Meeting Abstract
Undernutrition during early development (for example, due to maternal food restriction) can lead to altered phenotypes in offspring, including low birth weight, postnatal catch up growth, early pubertal development, and a predisposition toward obesity. The effect of food restricting the pregnant dam has been studied in the offspring of laboratory rats and mice, species that tend to respond to energetic deficit by increasing consummatory behavior, i.e., food intake. Other species, including human beings, Siberian hamsters, and Syrian hamsters, do not increase food intake after a period of food restriction or fasting, but they do increase appetitive behaviors such as grocery shopping (humans) and food hoarding (hamsters). We hypothesize that both appetitive and consummatory behaviors are programmed prenatally by maternal food availability during gestation. Specifically, we predicted that maternal food restriction would lead to Syrian hamster offspring with low adult levels of food hoarding, high adult levels of food intake, earlier puberty, and high levels of food efficiency leading to obesity. We tested this hypothesis using a cross-foster design and 10% food restriction during gestation. We found that Syrian hamsters are more sensitive to gestational restriction compared to rats and mice, leading to low birth weight and catch up growth, but no effect on time of the first estrous cycle. Only the offspring with food-restricted mothers both pre- and postnatally showed significant increases in food intake in adulthood. Future studies will test whether or not maternal food availability during gestation can influence the ability to switch between food and sex behavior in mature adults.
