Hormones play key roles in the risk of developing cognitive or affective disorders. Stress during early life causes dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, leading to increased glucocorticoid levels and contributing to developing anxiety and depression. Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) plays important roles in regulating neural development, protection, and plasticity, and thus is an important regulator of synaptic plasticity mechanisms that underlies learning and memory. Rats have been exposed to a stressor have deficits in learning or memory, in which changing of BDNF expression in the hippocampus is involved. Additionally, studies have found that stress in early life causes a decrease in BDNF levels, which subsequently disrupts processes like neurogenesis and synaptogenesis in the hippocampus and affects learning later in adulthood. The amount of BDNF reduction based on severity of stress, sex, and ages is not completely quantified. The project examines the relationship between stress and BDNF in adolescent rats, which may be involved in how early life stress may impact behavior in adulthood. An overarching purpose of this project is to compare the change of BDNF expression located in the hippocampus of the brain by stress between males and females. Half of the adolescent rats will undergo restraint stress for one hour on each of 13 continuous days during their adolescence, between four and six weeks of age, while the other half will not be stressed to serve as controls. We will compare the level of BDNF mRNA using a quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) between stressed and nonstressed rats as well as sex differences. Finally, stress hormones corticosterone and sex steroid hormones, estrogen and testosterone, will be measured using enzyme-linked immunosrobent assay (ELISA), and correlation between individual hormones and BDNF expression will be examined. The expected outcome is that hippocampal BDNF mRNA levels decrease as a result of stress in both males and females, and such a decrease may persist into adulthood in both males and females. Future studies include various behavior tests for learning and memory during both adolescence and adulthood to test if changes in the expression of BDNF would affect rats physically or mentally in their learning and memory.

Influence of chronic restraint stress during adolescence on brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) hippocampal expression in adult male and female rats

255th National Meeting (2018)

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