The administration of a low protein (LP, 8% protein/dry matter) but isocaloric diet to gestating rats did not affect their fertility, but slightly reduced the quantity of food intake as well as body weight gain. The LP diet also did not affect the placental weight, but the weight of the offspring was decreased. Accordingly the fetal endocrine pancreas was altered by the LP diet. Two different morphometric analyses showed that in the LP neonate B-cell proliferation and islet size were reduced in the head of the pancreas. In the pancreatic tail, these parameters were also decreased but to a lesser extend. Islet vascularization in the neonates was dramatically reduced in both parts of the pancreas when the mothers were fed with the LP diet.

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In rats that received a low protein isocaloric diet (protein content of the diet: 8 instead of 20%) during fetal life and thereafter up to the time of sacrifice at 12-13 weeks of age, a low plasma insulin concentration, a decreased insulin content of isolated pancreatic islets, and an impaired secretory response of the islets to either D-glucose or the association of L-leucine and L-glutamine coincided, in islet homogenates, with a low activity of the mitochondrial glycerophosphate dehydrogenase and an abnormally high ratio between glutamate-alanine and glutamate-aspartate transaminase activities. Opposite enzymatic changes were found in liver extracts of the same rats. No obvious change in these hormonal, secretory, and enzymatic variables were observed when the period of protein deficiency was restricted to fetal life. These findings support the view that, in protein malnutrition, an impaired activity of pancreatic B-cell mitochondrial glycerophosphate dehydrogenase contributes, possibly in association with other enzymatic anomalies, to the perturbation of islet function.

The localization of high-affinity uptake sites for 3H gamma-aminobutyric acid (3H-GABA) was investigated in the rat duodenum during ontogenesis and also at the adult stage (from 15.5 days of fetal life up to 105 days post natum) by means of low- and high-resolution autoradiography. At all stages studied, specific endocrine cell types of the epithelium were labelled and an intense uptake was detected in the nervous tissue, especially in glial cells but also in scarce neurones. When the incubation medium was supplemented with beta-alanine (1 mM), a blocker of the glial uptake for GABA, the labelling persisted only in endocrine cells and in few neurones. The intensity and the frequency of the labelling decreased at later periods compared to the earlier developmental stages. The GABA content of the duodenum as measured by a new ion-exchange column chromatography-HPLC-coupled method was higher in the early postnatal period compared to later stages. These observations suggest that GABA, in addition to being a neurotransmitter, may play an important role during development of the duodenum.