It’s every teenage gamer’s dream: being able to ‘remote control’ your mum to bring you snacks. But new research shows that most of us have, in fact, already done this to our poor mothers – thanks to our dads.
According to scientists from the University of Cambridge, fetuses use a gene inherited from their fathers, known as the lgf2 gene, to force their mothers to release more nutrients during pregnancy.
The lgf2 gene is part of what the scientists are calling the baby’s ‘remote control system’ – a section of DNA that determines how nutrients between baby and mother are shared.
According to the scientists behind the research, it’s the first evidence that a dad’s gene allows his unborn child to send these demanding signals.
“Genes controlled by the father are ‘greedy’ and ‘selfish’ and will tend to manipulate maternal resources for the benefit of the fetuses, so to grow them big and fittest,” said Dr Miguel Constancia of the Wellcome-MRC Institute of Metabolic Science and co-senior author of the paper.
Paternal genes generally promote fetus growth – whereas those from the mother tend to be more limiting. This means that the greedy signals given by the father kick off an unusual war between the mother and baby.
It’s a fine balance: while the mother’s body wants the baby to be healthy, she also needs the same glucose and fats for her own health. She needs these resources so that she can deliver the baby, breastfeed it, and then, potentially, have more babies.
And not just that – limiting the nutrients to the fetus also means the baby at the end of the pregnancy isn’t too big to come out.
“Although pregnancy is largely cooperative, there is a big arena for potential conflict between the mother and the baby, with imprinted genes and the placenta thought to play key roles,” said Constancia.
The study, published in the journal Cell Metabolism, was done on pregnant mice. The scientists altered the signalling cells in the placenta: the organ that develops alongside the fetus and acts as the gateway to nutrients.
The scientists deleted the lgf2 gene in the placenta which provides instructions to the mother for making a protein which is key in growing the liver and brain. Switching it off means that the mother does not make enough of the protein and the fetus doesn’t grow properly.
The research has helped scientists understand why babies with a defect in this gene are often overgrown or growth-stunted. In the future, they hope that these results could help them develop ways of targeting the placenta to improve the health of mothers and babies.
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