Nutrition and immunity in pregnancy: maternal responses and consequences for offspring

During pregnancy, the mother's immune system faces the task of protecting both the mother and her foetus. Mothers rely on nutrients to maintain their physiological condition and immune system, and also to nourish their developing offspring. A key question is: when mothers face challenges to their physiological state, how do they allocate energy to protect themselves and their offspring? When does this result in adverse outcomes, such as pre-term birth?

To date, most research on pregnancy exposures involves long-term studies in humans or experiments on laboratory rodents or larger mammals. We have a solid understanding of how nutrition or infections in pregnancy influence birth timing and offspring development. Remarkably few studies have considered the interaction between nutrition and infections, potentially owing to the scale and complexity of studies involved, or because we have yet to develop a clear conceptual framework to develop testable hypotheses about this interaction.

Here, I propose a project which tackles these two challenges head on: first, to develop a formal framework on the interplay between nutrition and infection in pregnancy, informed by evolutionary theory, and to test predictions using insect models of pregnancy, in parallel with analysis of datasets from contrasting human populations. I will first conduct a scoping review of human and animal model studies to identify the pathways linking nutrition, pathogen exposure and inflammatory responses in pregnant mothers, and consequences for offspring. I will then develop mathematical models to examine causality: how do energy trade-offs between defending against pathogens or nourishing offspring explain the optimal immune response across pregnancy stages?

This formal framework will inform experiments in insects, which are extremely amenable with well-studied mechanisms, including highly conserved immune pathways found in vertebrates. Most research on insect immunity has focused on egg-laying...