Association of exposure to ambient air pollution with thyroid function during pregnancy

Abstract

IMPORTANCE Air pollutants interact with estrogen nuclear receptors, but their effect on thyroid signaling is less clear. Thyroid function is of particular importance for pregnant women because of the thyroid's role in fetal brain development.OBJECTIVE To determine the short-term association of exposure to air pollution in the first trimester with thyroid function throughout pregnancy. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS In this cohort study, 9931 pregnant women from 4European cohorts (the Amsterdam Born Children and Their Development Study, the Generation R Study, Infancia y Medio Ambiente, and Rhea) and 1 US cohort (Project Viva) with data on air pollution exposure and thyroid function during pregnancy were included. The recruitment period for the

Enhancers are genes that express organizational RNAs

“…Enhancer-mediated DNA "loops" may be equivalent to topologically-associated domains (TADs) identified by chromatin conformation capture analysis (Rao et al, 2014;Symmons et al, 2014;Lupianez et al, 2015;Hansen et al, 2018;Souaid et al, 2018) and play a role in the formation and organization of such domains (Furlong and Levine, 2018;Souaid et al, 2018;Lim and Levine, 2021). TAD boundaries are maintained by the interplay of the Cohesin and Mediator complexes and the zinc finger "transcription factor" CTCF (Kagey et al, 2010;Lee and Iyer, 2012;Wutz et al, 2017;Hansen et al, 2018;Popay and Dixon, 2022), all of which bind RNA or RNA/DNA hybrids (Yao et al, 2010;Saldana-Meyer et al, 2014;Kung et al, 2015;Hansen et al, 2019;Pan et al, 2020;Kuru-Schors et al, 2021). Enhancers also play a role in the etiology of complex diseases, developmental disorders and cancer (Hnisz et al, 2013;Smith and Shilatifard, 2014;Herz, 2016;Chen and Liang, 2020;Jindal and Farley, 2021), and disruptions of chromatin topological domains lead to rewiring of gene-enhancer interactions with pathogenic consequences (Smith and Shilatifard, 2014;Lupianez et al, 2015;Krijger and de Laat, 2016;Souaid et al, 2018;Nott et al, 2019;Beagan et al, 2020;Nasser et al, 2021).…”