PUBLICATION
Cortisol-treated zebrafish embryos develop into pro-inflammatory adults with aberrant immune gene regulation
- Authors
- Hartig, E.I., Zhu, S., King, B.L., Coffman, J.A.
- ID
- ZDB-PUB-160725-8
- Date
- 2016
- Source
- Biology Open 5(8): 1134-41 (Journal)
- Registered Authors
- Coffman, James A.
- Keywords
- Chronic stress, Developmental programming, Glucocorticoid, Immune system, RNA-seq, Zebrafish
- Datasets
- GEO:GSE80221, GEO:GSE80286, GEO:GSE80260
- MeSH Terms
- none
- PubMed
- 27444789 Full text @ Biol. Open
Citation
Hartig, E.I., Zhu, S., King, B.L., Coffman, J.A. (2016) Cortisol-treated zebrafish embryos develop into pro-inflammatory adults with aberrant immune gene regulation. Biology Open. 5(8):1134-41.
Abstract
Chronic early-life stress increases adult susceptibility to numerous health problems linked to chronic inflammation. One way that this may occur is via glucocorticoid-induced developmental programming. To gain insight into such programming we treated zebrafish embryos with cortisol and examined the effects on both larvae and adults. Treated larvae had elevated whole-body cortisol and glucocorticoid signaling, and upregulated genes associated with defense response and immune system processes. In adulthood the treated fish maintained elevated basal cortisol levels in the absence of exogenous cortisol, and constitutively mis-expressed genes involved in defense response and its regulation. Adults derived from cortisol-treated embryos displayed defective tailfin regeneration, heightened basal expression of pro-inflammatory genes, and failure to appropriately regulate those genes following injury or immunological challenge. These results support the hypothesis that chronically elevated glucocorticoid signaling early in life directs development of a pro-inflammatory adult phenotype, at the expense of immunoregulation and somatic regenerative capacity.
Genes / Markers
Expression
Phenotype
Mutations / Transgenics
Human Disease / Model
Sequence Targeting Reagents
Fish
Orthology
Engineered Foreign Genes
Mapping