Fetal hypoxia (e.g., ischemia, threatened abortion) is one of the risk factors for neurodevelopmental disorder. We previously announced that exposure of prenatal hypoxic stress showed neurodevelopmental disease-like phenotype in rat and glial fibrillary acidic protein-positive cells were decrease in the rat cingulate cortex and hippocampus. In this study, we performed the qPCR and TUNEL staining to investigate the influence of fetal hypoxic stress in the brain. In gene expression analysis, fetal brain after hypoxic stress showed decrease of gliogenesis-related gene, especially Notch signal downstream genes were remarkedly decrease. In addition, one of these gene expression remained decrease in neonatal rat brain receiving prenatal hypoxic stress. Furthermore, TUNEL-positive cell expression was unchanged by prenatal hypoxia.
These results indicated that prenatal hypoxia decreased the expression of Notch signal downstream gene in both prenatal and neonatal brain without affecting cell death.