{"id":221311,"date":"2025-09-02T08:26:04","date_gmt":"2025-09-02T13:26:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/your-mothers-germs-may-have-influenced-your-brains-development"},"modified":"2025-09-02T08:26:04","modified_gmt":"2025-09-02T13:26:04","slug":"your-mothers-germs-may-have-influenced-your-brains-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/your-mothers-germs-may-have-influenced-your-brains-development","title":{"rendered":"Your Mother\u2019s Germs May Have Influenced Your Brain\u2019s Development"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/your-mothers-germs-may-have-influenced-your-brains-development.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Our bodies are colonized by a teeming, ever-changing <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/a-strange-world-of-organisms-lives-inside-you-but-not-like-you-think\">mass of microbes<\/a> that help power countless biological processes. Now, a new study has identified how these microorganisms get to work shaping the brain before birth.<\/p>\n<p>Researchers at Georgia State University studied newborn mice specifically bred in a germ-free environment to prevent any microbe colonization. Some of these mice were immediately placed with mothers with normal microbiota, which leads to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/we-contain-a-variety-of-microbiomes-heres-a-look-at-a-few-of-the-most-important\">microbes being transferred<\/a> rapidly.<\/p>\n<p>That gave the study authors a way to pinpoint just how early microbes begin influencing the developing brain. Their focus was on the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Paraventricular_nucleus\">paraventricular nucleus<\/a> (PVN), a region of the hypothalamus tied to stress and social behavior, already known to be partly influenced <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1038\/s41586-021-03669-y\">by microbe activity<\/a> in mice later in life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Our bodies are colonized by a teeming, ever-changing mass of microbes that help power countless biological processes. Now, a new study has identified how these microorganisms get to work shaping the brain before birth. Researchers at Georgia State University studied newborn mice specifically bred in a germ-free environment to prevent any microbe colonization. Some of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-221311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221311\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}