Maternal perinatal undernutrition modifies lactose and serotranferrin in milk: relevance to the programming of metabolic diseases?

A close link between intrauterine growth restriction and development of chronic adult diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and hypertension has been established both in humans and animals. Modification of growth velocity during the early postnatal period (i.e., lactation) may also sensitize to the development of metabolic syndrome in adulthood. This suggests that milk composition may have long-lasting programming/deprogramming metabolic effects in the offspring. We therefore assess the effects of maternal perinatal denutrition on breast milk composition in a food-restricted 50% (FR50) rat model. Monosaccharides and fatty acids were characterized by gas chromatography, and proteins were profiled by surface-enhanced laser desorption/ionization-time-of-flight analysis in milk samples from FR50 and control rat dams. Milk analysis of FR50 rats demonstrated that maternal undernutrition decreases lactose concentration and modulates lipid profile at postnatal day 10 by increasing the unsaturated fatty acids/saturated fatty acids and diminishes serotransferrin levels at postnatal day 21. Our data indicate that maternal perinatal undernutrition modifies milk composition both quantitatively and qualitatively. These modifications by maternal nutrition open new perspectives to identify molecules that could be used in artificial milk to protect from the subsequent development of metabolic diseases.

Aqueous chlorination of carbamazepine: kinetic study and transformation product identification.

Carbamazepine reactivity and fate during chlorination was investigated in this study. From a kinetic standpoint, a third-order reaction (first-order relative to the CBZ concentration and second-order relative to the free chlorine concentration) was observed at neutral and slightly acidic pH, whereas a second-order reaction (first order relative to the CBZ concentration and first order relative to the free chlorine concentration) was noted under alkaline conditions. In order to gain insight into the observed pH-dependence of the reaction order, elementary reactions (i.e. reactions of Cl2, Cl2O, HOCl with CBZ and of ClO(-) with CBZ or of HOCl with the ionized form of CBZ) were highlighted and second order rate constants of each of them were calculated. Close correlations between the experimental and modeled values were obtained under these conditions. Cl2 and Cl2O were the main chlorination agents at neutral and acidic pH. These results indicate that, for a 1 mg/L free chlorine concentration and 1-10 mg/L chloride concentration at pH 7, halflives about 52-69 days can be expected. A low reactivity of chlorine with CBZ could thus occur under the chlorination steps used during water treatment. From a mechanistic viewpoint, several transformation products were observed during carbamazepine chlorination. As previously described for the chlorination of polynuclear aromatic or unsaturated compounds, we proposed monohydroxylated, epoxide, diols or chlorinated alcohol derivatives of CBZ for the chemical structures of these degradation products. Most of these compounds seem to accumulate in solution in the presence of excess chlorine.

Glycosyl part identified within Balanites aegyptiaca fruit protease.

The many milk-clotting proteases from plant are glycosylated; attachment of monosaccharides to enzyme is an advantage for its activity and stability. In this study, gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry-electrospray ionization was used to identify glycans bond to proteases purified from Balanites aegyptiaca fruits pulp through cation exchange chromatography. Carbohydrates were identified according to the retention time and the ion at m/z after derivation by heptafluorobutyric acid. The chromatograms obtained from monosaccharides analysis revealed the presence of galactose, mannose, arabinose, xylose, rhamnose and glucuronic acid. The mass spectrometry-electrospray ionization spectra corroborated these findings.