Neuron Nacency: Exercise Offers New Beginnings

Mustroph, Martina Laetitia

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/49207 Copy

Description

Title

Neuron Nacency: Exercise Offers New Beginnings

Author(s)

Mustroph, Martina Laetitia

Issue Date

2014-05

Keyword(s)

Neuroscience

Abstract

In response to exercise, thousands of new neurons are born in the hippocampus, a brain structure implicated in learning and memory. I train mice to associate a context with cocaine by repeatedly exposing them to the context immediately after receiving drug. Letting mice exercise reduces their preference for a cocaine-paired context, in association with hippocampal neurogenesis, relative to couch potato (i.e. sedentary control) mice. This finding is exciting, as it suggests that hippocampal neurogenesis may be a useful intervention for drug-to-context associations thought to underlie drug addiction. The image shows a 40 'm-thick hippocampal tissue slice from a cocaine-trained runner mouse stained for bromodeoxyuridine (a marker of new cells; red),NeuN (a neuron marker; green), and S100 (a marker of astrocytes, a different type of brain cell; blue) and illuminated by a laser. The green blades consist of granular layer of the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus. New neurons are born in the subgranular zone (on the insides of the blades) and migrate out into the granular zone. Cells that fluoresce orange (=red green) indicate episodes of neurogenesis. I took the image on a confocal laser microscope in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology microscopy suite

Type of Resource

• text
• image

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/49207

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2014 Martina Laetitia Mustroph

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