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. 2020 Oct 9;39(23):e104579. doi: 10.15252/embj.2020104579

Figure 1. Effects of early life trauma on circulating metabolites in mice and humans.

Figure 1

  1. Paradigms of early life trauma in mice and humans. In mice, early life trauma consists of an exposure to unpredictable maternal separation combined with unpredictable maternal stress (MSUS). In humans, exposure involves paternal loss and maternal separation (PLMS) in early childhood (age 6–12).
  2. Scheme illustrating the MSUS model and control mice showing blood collection and breeding to generate an offspring. For MSUS (symbolized by yellow blitz), newborn pups are separated from their mother unpredictably 3 h/day from postnatal day (PND) 1–14. During separation, the dam is exposed to different stressors unpredictably9. Serum was prepared from blood collected from 3‐month‐old MSUS and control males.
  3. Differential pathway enrichment of metabolites in MSUS plasma from adult males and their offspring compared to controls (each group n = 5), and serum (PLMS, n = 20; control, n = 14) and saliva (PLMS, n = 25; control, n = 14) from PLMS and control children. Asterisk and hashtag represent FDR after multiple testing corrections using Benjamini–Hochberg (BH) test. Columns indicate significance for positive (+) and negative (−) enrichment.
  4. Individual metabolites in ALA/LA and AA pathways significantly altered in both MSUS and PLMS. Numbers represent fold change according to a heat scale (right).
Data information: #FDR < 0.1, *FDR < 0.05, **FDR < 0.01, ***FDR < 0.001, ****FDR < 0.0001. (/) symbolizes non‐significance. FDR, false discovery rate. ALA/LA, alpha‐linolenic acid/linoleic acid. AA, arachidonic acid. HETE, hydroxyeicosatetraenoic acid.