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Importance of methyl donors during reproduction

¹ From the Nutrition Research Institute, Department of Nutrition, School of Public Health and School of Medicine, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC.

² Presented at the symposium "Methyl Donors, Iodine, and DHA—Is Maternal Supplementation Beneficial?" held at Experimental Biology 2008, San Diego, CA, 6 April 2008.

³ Supported by a grant from the NIH (DK55865, AG09525) and by grants from the NIH to the University of North Carolina (UNC) Clinical Nutrition Research Unit (DK56350), the UNC General Clinical Research Center (RR00046), and the Center for Environmental Health and Susceptibility (ES10126).

⁴ Reprints not available. Address correspondence to SH Zeisel, Nutrition Research Institute, Department of Nutrition, School of Public Health and School of Medicine, University of North Carolina, CB# 7461, Chapel Hill, NC 27599. E-mail: steven_zeisel{at}unc.edu.

Evidence is growing that optimal dietary intake of folate and choline (both involved in one-carbon transfer or methylation) is important for successful completion of fetal development. Significant portions of the population are eating diets low in one or both of these nutrients. Folates are important for normal neural tube closure in early gestation, and the efficacy of diet fortification with folic acid in reducing the incidence of neural tube defects is a major success story for public health nutrition. Similarly, maternal dietary choline is important for normal neural tube closure in the fetus and, later in gestation, for neurogenesis in the fetal hippocampus, with effects on memory that persist in adult offspring; higher choline intake is associated with enhanced memory performance. Although both folates and choline have many potentially independent mechanisms whereby they could influence fetal development, these 2 nutrients also have a common mechanism for action: altered methylation and related epigenetic effects on gene expression.

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