How does the mother’s immune system influence the developing offspring? What role do T cells play? These were the driving question behind my Master’s degree research. Here, we experimentally activated the T cells of pregnant mice mid-gestation and monitored the offspring as they grew up into adulthood. When adults, we tested their spatial learning behaviors.
We found that offspring from mothers who were sick during pregnancy had reduced success in using spatial memory to navigate a maze. Offspring from mothers who were given saline during pregnancy completed the maze faster on every day of testing. While experimentally-treated offspring did learn (as seen by increasing success with practice), they were always worse compared to the control-treated offspring.
A paper based on this work is in preperation for submission, and a second paper focusing on how maternal illness differentally affects different strains of mice is also being prepared.