Proteomic and morphofunctional analysis of the heart of old animals submitted to maternal protein restriction

Abstract

The approach of the Developmental Origin of Health and Disease (DOHaD) aims to elucidate the correlation of the incidence of non-communicable chronic diseases with events suffered during pregnancy and/or early childhood. Among the diseases studied, the most prevalent are obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. Among the experimental models used for DOHaD studies is the submission of rodents to maternal protein restriction (PMR), which has already been described as responsible for the increased incidence of heart disease in aging. Despite this, the molecular mechanisms involved in this process have not yet been fully elucidated. In this context, the advancement of large-scale data generation technologies linked to bioinformatics tools has enabled a global integrative view of molecular mechanisms involved in normal and pathological conditions. The objective of this work will be to analyze tissue morphology, cardiac function and the global profile of protein expression (shotgun) in the heart of old rats (540 days of postnatal age) that underwent RPM, to identify possible molecular pathways involved in the development of heart disease with aging. For this, animals from the control group (CTR), whose mothers will consume diet containing 17% protein and those submitted to gestational and lactational protein restriction (RPGL), whose mothers will consume diet containing 6% protein will be analyzed by echocardiogram and later will be euthanized and fragments of the left heart ventricle will be sent for histological analysis and the proteomic technique by mass spectrometry (LC-Ms/Ms). Thus, it is expected to obtain a global view of the effects of DOHaD by RPM on cardiac morphophysiology, identifying proteins differently expressed in the heart of these animals and correlating with possible functional changes in this organ.(AU)