Spectroscopic study of the structural alterations in pups’ brain cells at the nanoscale level due to fetal alcoholism

Mesoscopic physic-based molecular specific light localization and microscopic imaging are highly sensitive spectroscopic techniques to study the structural abnormalities in brain cells/tissues. Fetal alcohol syndrome and other neurological disorders are the severe, and irreversible outcomes of fetal alcoholism. However, the nanoscale damages in cells/tissues are hardly diagnosed. In this work, we probe chronic alcoholic mothers' pup brain cells/tissue using dual spectroscopic approaches in a mouse model. First, the inverse participation ratio via confocal imaging, confocal-IPR, is used to probe DNA and histone spatial structural alterations. Then, a recently developed highly sensitive partial wave spectroscopy (PWS) is used to probe the nanoscales structural alterations in the pup’s brain tissues. The confocal-IPR technique shows an increase in the degree of spatial structural disorder in DNA, while a decrease in histone. An increase in spatial disorder in DNA might be due to DNA unwinding while a decrease in histone could be due to the release of histone from the DNA resulting in the unwinding of the DNA and gene expression. Besides, this result is supported by the PWS which shows an increase in the degree of structural disorder in the brain of pups exposed to fetal alcoholism.