Expression pattern dysregulation of stress- and neuronal activity-related genes in response to prenatal stress paradigm in zebrafish larvae

Maternal stress during pregnancy adversely affects developmental fetal programming. Glucocorticoid excess is one of those conditions that underlie the prenatal stress and can lead to many pathological disorders later in life. Beyond the obvious use of mammalian model organisms to uncover the different mechanisms at the basis of prenatal stress effects, zebrafish represents a complementary fruitful model for this research field. Here we demonstrated that the application of an experimental paradigm, which simulates prenatal stress by exposing embryos to cortisol excess, produced an alteration of gene expression pattern. In particular, the transcript level of hsd11b2, a gene involved in the cortisol catabolism, was affected in prenatally stressed larvae, even after many hours from the removal of cortisol excess. Interestingly, the expression pattern of c-fos, a marker gene of neural activity, was affected in prenatally stressed larvae even in response to a swirling and osmotic stress challenge. Our data corroborate the idea of zebrafish as a useful model organism to study prenatal stress effects on vertebrate development.