Photonics Probing of Pup Brain Cell/Tissue Nano-Alterations in Fetal Alcoholism

Overview

Alcohol consumption during pregnancy by a mother, or fetal alcoholism, is one of the major factors of mental retardation in children born to such mother. Major health problems reported are directly or indirectly related with alcohol, and is a major concern. alcohol affects all the major organs of the body like liver, heart, brain, pancreas, and the immune system is degraded by alcohol. Most of the researches have shown that alcohol has more effect in women than in men. alcohol consumption during pregnancy leads to different disabilities known as fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASDs). Fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) and alcohol-related neurodevelopmental disorder (ARND) are the awful outcomes of the maternal alcohol consumption, linked with notable cognitive and behavioral deficits in children. One child born of every 13 women who consumed alcohol during pregnancy is found to have fetal alcohol disorder syndrome. The number of infants born with FADS is estimated to 630,000 annually worldwide, and this number increasing every year. This preventable issue is a leading cause of intellectual disability, birth defects, and developmental disorders. The baby in womb is unable to metabolize the alcohol through liver or any other organs and alcohol, being teratogenic, interferes with the healthy development of the baby resulting in brain damages and other birth effects. This might affect the brain cells/tissues at the very nano to submicron levels which can’t be predicted by the ongoing histological procedures, and this has not been well studied or understood. Therefore, the nano to submicron scales probing of brain tissues and cell nuclei using animal model of fetal alcoholism may provide plethora of information about the fetal alcoholism and brain defects. This project intends to measure and quantify nano to submicron scales structural changes in brain cells and tissues of pups exposed to fetal alcoholism. For this, recently developed dual optical techniques will be used, namely i) the partial wave spectroscopy (PWS) technique for tissue structure characterization and ii) the inverse participation ratio (IPR) technique using confocal microscopy to characterize the DNA as well as histone molecular structural density fluctuations, in the nuclei of cells from pups’ brains. This is a new approach to understand the nano to submicron scales structural changes in brain tissues and cells, therefore highly biomedical significance in understanding brain damages in fetal alcoholism. The damage in the brain tissue structures and DNA/histone molecular mass density will be studied with the different chronic fetal alcohol doses. The damage of the brain tissue structures of pups will be quantified by using nano to submicron scale structural properties of tissue and DNA/histone molecular mass density structure in the nuclei, therefore, the project is highly innovative.