Meeting Abstract
Based on studies in humans and lab rodents, it has been suggested that a mother’s diet plays a central role in programming offspring organ development. As a result, offspring typically display improved health and performance when their adult diet matches the quality of the diet their mother consumed as they developed. Although this effect has important implications for the ability of wild populations to respond to changing environmental conditions, the relative importance of maternal programming in free-ranging animals is poorly understood. With this investigation, we evaluate plasticity of organ mass in the house mice (Mus musculus). Mice were maintained in enclosures designed to mimic the home range and group sizes of mice living in a barn or similar building. The parental generation of mice was maintained on 10% or 20% protein diet. A subset of young was euthanized at weaning and all additional young were kept on the same diet as their parents or switched to the alternate diet. Two additional sets of offspring were euthanized just before the onset of reproduction (56 d) and at 1 year of age. At each time period, body mass and masses of the liver, spleen, kidneys and abdominal fat pads were recorded for each individual. Our results suggest that maternal diet did not have a significant impact on organ mass at weaning. Just before onset of reproduction, the mass of the kidneys were greater in young in the high-high and low-high treatment than in the other two groups but no other effects were seen. At one year of age, we found no significant effects of treatment group on organ mass. These results suggest a mothers diet may have little impact on offspring organ development in wild populations, although this does not preclude the possibility that organ physiology differed between groups.
