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Neuro developmental diseases are often associated with viral infection during pregnancy. In mice, Maternal Immune Activation (MIA) results in cognitive and social abnormalities of the offspring at adulthood. However, the underlying mechanism is still not fully understood. Here we hypothesized that prenatal immune challenge might impact the developing microglia, which thereby perturbs the normal brain development. To test this hypothesis, we treated pregnant dams with the viral mimetic poly(I:C), as the prenatal inflammatory stimuli, 14.5 days following gestation, and compared the microglia isolated from their offspring, to microglia isolated from offspring of PBS treated pregnant controls. Using high-throughput mRNA sequencing and gene ontology analysis, we found a reduction in expression of genes related to proliferation and cell cycle in the microglia isolated from newborn offspring of poly(I:C) injected dams …