Prenatal vitamin D deficiency alters immune cell proportions of offspring in young adult age [RNA-seq]

Vitamin D deficiency is a common micronutrient deficiency worldwide, especially among reproductive-age women, and vitamin D deficiency during pregnancy increases the risks of offspring’s immune-related diseases later in life. The mechanisms of how our body remembers the exposure status of an adverse environment during development have not been fully elucidated yet. Here we show that prenatal vitamin D deficiency exposure alters the immune cell proportion of the offspring at the prenatal and adult stage, which is attributed to transcriptional alterations of vitamin D receptor downstream genes. Further, we assessed the association between maternal vitamin D status and cord blood immune cell profiles from 75 healthy mother and their term baby pairs and found that maternal vitamin D deficiency significantly alters immune cell proportion in cord blood. Our findings demonstrate that prenatal vitamin D deficiency alters the immune cell compositions of offspring by changing the transcriptional properties of stem cells and altering long-term stem cell fate decisions.