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Background: Poor prenatal maternal sleep is a pervasive, yet modifiable, health concern affecting maternal and foetal wellbeing. Experimental rodent studies demonstrate that prenatal maternal sleep deprivation affects offspring brain development and leads to adverse outcomes, including increased anxiety-like behaviour. We examined the relation between prenatal maternal sleep quality and neonatal white matter development and subsequent infant negative emotionality., Methods: Participants included 116 mother-infant (53% female) dyads. Prenatal sleep quality was prospectively assessed three times during gestation (16, 29, and 35 gestational weeks) using the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index. Neonatal white matter, as indexed by fractional anisotropy (FA), was assessed via diffusion weighted magnetic resonance imaging. Negative emotionality was measured via behavioural observation and maternal report when the infant was 6-months of age., Findings: More prenatal sleep problems across pregnancy were associated with higher neonatal FA in the uncinate fasciculus (left: b = 0.20, p = .004; right: b = 0.15, p = .027). Higher neonatal uncinate FA was linked to infant negative emotionality, and uncinate FA partially mediated the association between prenatal maternal sleep and behavioural observation of infant negative emotionality., Interpretation: Findings highlight prenatal sleep as an environmental signal that affects the developing neonatal brain and later infant negative emotionality., Funding: National Institutes of Health (R01MH109662, R01HL155744, P50HD103573, K12AR084226, F32 Training fellowships MH125572, HL165844, MH106440, and diversity supplement R01HL155744-01S1)., Competing Interests: Declaration of interests The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Published by Elsevier B.V.)

Background: The rapid maturation of the fetal brain renders the fetus susceptible to prenatal environmental signals. Prenatal maternal sleep quality is known to have important health implications for newborns including risk for preterm birth, however, the effect on the fetal brain is poorly understood., Method: Participants included 94 pregnant participants and their newborns (53% female). Pregnant participants (M age = 30; SD age = 5.29) reported on sleep quality three times throughout pregnancy. Newborn hippocampal and amygdala volumes were assessed using structural magnetic resonance imaging. Multilevel modeling was used to test the associations between trajectories of prenatal maternal sleep quality and newborn hippocampal and amygdala volume., Results: The overall trajectory of prenatal maternal sleep quality was associated with hippocampal volume (left: b = 0.00003, p = 0.013; right: b = 0.00003, p = .008). Follow up analyses assessing timing of exposure indicate that poor sleep quality early in pregnancy was associated with larger hippocampal volume bilaterally (e.g., late gestation left: b = 0.002, p = 0.24; right: b = 0.004, p = .11). Prenatal sleep quality was not associated with amygdala volume., Conclusion: These findings highlight the implications of poor prenatal maternal sleep quality and its role in contributing to newborn hippocampal development., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Published by Elsevier Ltd.)

Background: A large body of research supports the deleterious effects of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) on disease susceptibility and health for both the exposed individual and the next generation. It is likely that there is an intergenerational transmission of risk from mother to child; however, the mechanisms through which such risk is conferred remain unknown. The current study evaluated the association between maternal ACEs, neonatal brain development of the amygdala and hippocampus, and later infant negative emotionality at six months of age., Methods: The sample included 85 mother-infant dyads (44 female infants) from a longitudinal study. Maternal ACEs were assessed with the Adverse Childhood Experiences Questionnaire (ACE-Q) and neonatal hippocampal and amygdala volume was assessed using structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Infant negative emotionality was assessed at 6 months using the Infant Behavior Questionnaire (IBQ)., Results: Multivariate analyses demonstrated that maternal ACEs were associated with bilateral amygdala volume ( F (2,78) = 3.697, p = .029). Specifically, higher maternal ACEs were associated with smaller left (β = -0.220, t (79) = -2.661, p  = .009, R 2 = 0.494, and right (β = -0.167, t (79) = -2.043, p  = .044, R 2 = 0.501) amygdala volume. No significant association between maternal ACEs and bilateral hippocampal volume ( F (2,78) = 0.215, p = .0807) was found. Follow-up regression analyses demonstrated that both high maternal ACEs and smaller left amygdala volume were associated with higher infant negative emotionality at six months of age (β = .232, p  = .040, R 2 = 0.094, and β = -0.337, p  = .022, R 2 = 0.16, respectively) although statistically significant mediation of this effect was not observed (Indirect effect = 0.0187, 95% CI [-0.0016-0.0557])., Conclusions: Maternal ACEs are associated with both newborn amygdala volume and subsequent infant negative emotionality. These findings linking maternal adverse childhood experiences and infant brain development and temperament provide evidence to support the intergenerational transmission of adversity from mother to child., Competing Interests: Dr. Bagonis reports employment at PrimeNeuro. All other authors report having no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest., (© 2022 The Authors.)

The prenatal period represents a critical time for brain growth and development. These rapid neurological advances render the fetus susceptible to various influences with life-long implications for mental health. Maternal distress signals are a dominant early life influence, contributing to birth outcomes and risk for offspring psychopathology. This prospective longitudinal study evaluated the association between prenatal maternal distress and infant white matter microstructure. Participants included a racially and socioeconomically diverse sample of 85 mother-infant dyads. Prenatal distress was assessed at 17 and 29 weeks' gestational age (GA). Infant structural data were collected via diffusion tensor imaging at 42-45 weeks' postconceptional age. Findings demonstrated that higher prenatal maternal distress at 29 weeks' GA was associated with increased fractional anisotropy ( b = .283, t (64) = 2.319, p = .024) and with increased axial diffusivity ( b = .254, t (64) = 2.067, p = .043) within the right anterior cingulate white matter tract. No other significant associations were found with prenatal distress exposure and tract fractional anisotropy or axial diffusivity at 29 weeks' GA, nor earlier in gestation., Competing Interests: Conflicts of Interest: None.

Growth cones are complex, motile structures at the tip of an outgrowing neurite. They often exhibit a high density of filopodia (thin actin bundles), which complicates the unbiased quantification of their morphologies by software. Contemporary image processing methods require extensive tuning of segmentation parameters, require significant manual curation, and are often not sufficiently adaptable to capture morphology changes associated with switches in regulatory signals. To overcome these limitations, we developed Growth Cone Analyzer (GCA). GCA is designed to quantify growth cone morphodynamics from time-lapse sequences imaged both in vitro and in vivo, but is sufficiently generic that it may be applied to nonneuronal cellular structures. We demonstrate the adaptability of GCA through the analysis of growth cone morphological variation and its relation to motility in both an unperturbed system and in the context of modified Rho GTPase signaling. We find that perturbations inducing similar changes in neurite length exhibit underappreciated phenotypic nuance at the scale of the growth cone., (© 2018 Bagonis et al.)