Funding outcome

What we eat before we are born can change our chances of developing a disease as an adult. Before a baby is born, it depends on mom for all of its food. This means that if mom cannot get all that she needs from her diet, neither can the developing baby. For example, iron is a tricky nutrient for our bodies to work with. Even with access to enough food or iron supplements, it is still possible that a pregnant woman may not have enough iron to support the developing baby. Low iron during pregnancy affects more than 32 million pregnant women around the world in both low-income and high-income countries (like Canada). We now know that having low iron before you are born changes the way your body and organs grow. This can change how they work for the rest of your life. Through our research, we want to understand how low iron can affect the developing baby and use this to find new ways of making sure the baby will grow properly so it can stay healthy for all its life. The best way to study this is by giving rats iron deficient food and look at how their babies grow. Iron is important for us because it helps the powerhouse of the cell - the mitochondria - produce energy. So, we first want to understand how missing iron affects the powerhouse of the cell in the growing heart. The heart relies on the mitochondria for its energy supply. If these energy producers cannot work because they are missing an important piece, like iron, the heart may develop in a way that makes that baby more likely to get a disease as an adult. To study the powerhouse of the cell, we will measure how hard they are working. We will also measure how much and what kind of 'pollution' (called reactive oxygen species) they are making. Then, we will try to heal the mitochondria using a treatment called an antioxidant that specifically targets the powerhouse of the cell. Right now, fixing low iron in pregnant women is not always simple or fast. The goal of our project is to find a way to quickly make sure that, even when iron is low, the baby can continue to grow in a healthy way. By doing this, we hope to prevent adults from developing problems like heart disease, heart attacks, and high blood pressure so everyone can live a long, happy, and healthy life.