Parenting Fears and Concerns during Pregnancy: A Qualitative Survey

Previous research on the fears and anxieties of expectant mothers has focused mostly on their fears about giving birth rather than parenting. This study aims to describe mothers’ fears and concerns about parenthood during pregnancy and to examine the similarities and differences in the perspectives of primiparous and multiparous mothers. The qualitative research for this study was conducted in three postpartum units in Finland and focused on the responses to an open-ended question about parenting fears and concerns that was part of a questionnaire given to 250 mothers after they had given birth. The responses from the 128 mothers who answered this question were subject to inductive content analysis. Fears and concerns on parenthood included worries about coping with the future and everyday life with their new baby, the psychological burden of parenthood, their maternal resources and self-efficacy, meeting their baby’s needs, their baby’s health, concerns about their relationship with their partner and financial issues. Primiparous and multiparous mothers shared many of the same concerns, but some differences emerged. The findings contribute an interesting perspective to the social debate about declining birth rates and their psychosocial causes. Further studies are needed to examine the fears and concerns of younger adults, and even teens, about parenthood.

Targeted RNA-seq improves efficiency, resolution, and accuracy of allele specific expression for human term placentas

Genomic imprinting is an epigenetic mechanism that results in allele specific expression (ASE) based on parent of origin. It is known to play a role in the prenatal and postnatal allocation of maternal resources in mammals. ASE detected by whole transcriptome RNA-seq (wht-RNAseq) has been widely used to analyze imprinted genes using reciprocal crosses in mice to generate large numbers of informative SNPs. Studies in humans are more challenging due to the paucity of SNPs and the poor preservation of RNA in term placentas and other tissues. Targeted RNA-seq (tar-RNAseq) can potentially mitigate these challenges by focusing sequencing resources on the regions of interest in the transcriptome. Here we compared tar-RNAseq and wht-RNAseq in a study of ASE in known imprinted genes in placental tissue collected from a healthy human cohort in Mali, West Africa. As expected, tar-RNAseq substantially improved the coverage of SNPs. Compared to wht-RNAseq, tar-RNAseq produced on average four times more SNPs in twice as many genes per sample and read depth at the SNPs increased 4-fold. In previous research on humans, discordant ASE values for SNPs of the same gene have limited the ability to accurately quantify ASE. We show that tar-RNAseq reduces this limitation as it unexpectedly increased the concordance of ASE between SNPs of the same gene, even in cases of degraded RNA. Studies aimed at discovering associations between individual variation in ASE and phenotypes in mammals and flowering plants will benefit from the improved power and accuracy of tar-RNAseq.

Correction to: Factor Structure and Equivalence of Maternal Resources for Care in Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Ethiopia

The article “Factor Structure and Equivalence of Maternal Resources for Care in Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Ethiopia”, written by Sulochana Basnet, Edward A. Frongillo, Phuong Hong Nguyen, Spencer Moore and Mandana Arabi, was originally published electronically on the publisher's internet portal on 25 February 2021 without open access. With the author(s)' decision to opt for Open Choice the copyright of the article changed on 26 March 2021 to © The Author(s) 2021 and the article is forthwith distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Inter-national License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain per-mission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licen ses/by/4.0. The original article has been corrected..

Growth Restriction and Genomic Imprinting-Overlapping Phenotypes Support the Concept of an Imprinting Network

Intrauterine and postnatal growth disturbances are major clinical features of imprinting disorders, a molecularly defined group of congenital syndromes caused by molecular alterations affecting parentally imprinted genes. These genes are expressed monoallelically and in a parent-of-origin manner, and they have an impact on human growth and development. In fact, several genes with an exclusive expression from the paternal allele have been shown to promote foetal growth, whereas maternally expressed genes suppress it. The evolution of this correlation might be explained by the different interests of the maternal and paternal genomes, aiming for the conservation of maternal resources for multiple offspring versus extracting maximal maternal resources. Since not all imprinted genes in higher mammals show the same imprinting pattern in different species, the findings from animal models are not always transferable to human. Therefore, human imprinting disorders might serve as models to understand the complex regulation and interaction of imprinted loci. This knowledge is a prerequisite for the development of precise diagnostic tools and therapeutic strategies for patients affected by imprinting disorders. In this review we will specifically overview the current knowledge on imprinting disorders associated with growth retardation, and its increasing relevance in a personalised medicine direction and the need for a multidisciplinary therapeutic approach.

RNA Pol IV has antagonistic parent-of-origin effects on Arabidopsis endosperm

Gene expression in endosperm, a seed tissue that mediates transfer of maternal resources to offspring, is under complex epigenetic control. We show here that plant-specific RNA Polymerase IV mediates parental control of endosperm gene expression. Pol IV is required for the production of small interfering RNAs that typically direct DNA methylation. We compared small RNAs, DNA methylation, and mRNAs in A. thaliana endosperm from reciprocal heterozygotes produced by crossing wildtype plants to Pol IV mutants. We find that maternally and paternally acting Pol IV have divergent effects on endosperm with loss of maternal and paternal Pol IV impacting sRNAs and DNA methylation at different genomic sites. Strikingly, maternally and paternally-acting Pol IV have antagonistic impacts on gene expression at some loci, divergently promoting or repressing endosperm gene expression. Antagonistic parent-of13 origin effects have only rarely been described and are consistent with a gene regulatory system evolving under parental conflict.

Targeted RNA-seq improves efficiency, resolution, and accuracy of allele specific expression for human term placentas

Genomic imprinting is an epigenetic mechanism that results in allele specific expression (ASE) based on parent of origin. It is known to play a role in the prenatal and postnatal allocation of maternal resources in mammals. ASE detected by whole transcriptome RNA-seq (wht-RNAseq) has been widely used to analyze imprinted genes using reciprocal crosses in mice to generate large numbers of informative SNPs. Studies in humans are more challenging due to the paucity of SNPs and the poor preservation of RNA in term placentas and other tissues. Targeted RNA-seq (tar-RNAseq) can potentially mitigate these challenges by focusing sequencing resources on the regions of interest in the transcriptome. Here we compared tar-RNAseq and wht-RNAseq in a study of ASE in known imprinted genes in placental tissue collected from a healthy human cohort in Mali, West Africa. As expected, tar-RNAseq substantially improved the coverage of SNPs. Compared to wht-RNAseq, tar-RNAseq produced on average four times more SNPs in twice as many genes per sample and read depth at the SNPs increased 4-fold. In previous research on humans, discordant ASE values for SNPs of the same gene have limited the ability to accurately quantify ASE. We show that tar-RNAseq reduces this limitation as it unexpectedly increased the concordance of ASE between SNPs of the same gene, even in cases of degraded RNA. Studies aimed at discovering associations between individual variation in ASE and phenotypes in mammals and flowering plants will benefit from the improved power and accuracy of tar-RNAseq.

New Partner, New Order? Multipartnered Fertility and Birth Order Effects on Educational Achievement

A substantial amount of research shows that younger siblings perform worse than their older sisters and brothers in several socioeconomic outcomes, including educational achievement. Most of these studies examined stable families and excluded half-siblings. However, the increasing prevalence of multipartnered fertility implies that many children grow up in nonnuclear families. We examine whether there is evidence for birth order effects in this context, which offers an opportunity to test and potentially expand the explanatory scope of the two main theories on birth order effects. We use comprehensive Norwegian registry data to study siblings in the 1985–1998 cohorts born to mothers or fathers who parented children with at least two partners. We provide evidence for negative effects of birth order on lower secondary school grades in both cases. Children born to fathers displaying multipartnered fertility tend to have lower grades than older full siblings but perform more similarly or better compared with older half-siblings. For siblings born to mothers with the multipartnered fertility pattern, later-born siblings do worse in school compared with all older siblings. This indicates that negative birth order effects tend to operate either within or across sets of full siblings, depending on the sex of the parent displaying multipartnered fertility. We argue that these findings can be explained by a combination of resource dilution/confluence theory and sex differences in residential arrangements following union dissolutions. We also suggest an alternative interpretation: maternal resources could be more important for generating negative birth order effects.