Brain injury often impairs a person’s ability to remember. To find new drugs that improve memory after brain injury, scientist must rely on experiments in animals such as rats. But how do you test the rats? One way is use pool of colored water, called Morris water maze. In this maze, rats have “remember” where go get out water. The more rat’s has improved, quicker it finds its (rats not like be...

AIM To investigate the effect of antisense oligonucleotide (ASODN) of noggin on rat spatial learning and memory. METHODS Expression of noggin mRNA was measured by in situ hybridization method and the ability to spatial learning and memory was tested with Morris water maze. RESULTS Compared with control rats, noggin mRNA positive neurons in dentate gyrus (DG) and CA3 region of hippocampus we...

To examine the effect of biflorin, a component of Syzygium aromaticum, on memory deficit, we introduced a scopolamine-induced cognitive deficit mouse model. A single administration of biflorin increased latency time in the passive avoidance task, ameliorated alternation behavior in the Y-maze, and increased exploration time in the Morris water maze task, indicating the improvement of cognitive ...

Following bilateral lesions targeting lateral deep cerebellar nuclei, rats were subjected to a bridge test as a measure of visuomotor coordination and were trained on the Morris water maze (MWM) as a measure of visuospatial processing. Lesioned rats were significantly impaired in visuospatial processing, but not visuomotor coordination, relative to sham rats. In a 2nd experiment, rats were pret...

Fructus Akebiae (FAE) is a component of traditional Chinese medicines used for the clinical treatment of amnesia. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of FAE extract on scopolamine-induced learning and memory impairment in mice and Sprague-Dawley rats. Treatment with FAE (2.5, 5 and 10 mg/kg) was investigated in scopolamine-treated animals, and its effects on different ty...

Calcineurin is a calcium-dependent protein phosphatase that has been implicated in various aspects of synaptic plasticity. By using conditional gene-targeting techniques, we created mice in which calcineurin activity is disrupted specifically in the adult forebrain. At hippocampal Schaffer collateral-CA1 synapses, LTD was significantly diminished, and there was a significant shift in the LTD/LT...

The age-related decline of learning and memory is a common phenomenon in humans and animals, even though the underlying mechanism is not yet known. In the present study, we propose that synaptotagmin 1 (Syt 1) might be a synaptic protein involved in the loss of learning and memory with aging. To test this hypothesis, the age-related spatial cognitive ability of 36 P8 mice (15 mice aged 4 months...

Nitric oxide (NO) has been implicated in the control of emotion, learning, and memory. We have examined endothelial NO synthase-deficient mice (eNOS-/-) in terms of habituation to an open field, elevated plus-maze behavior, Morris water maze performance, and changes in cerebral monoamines. In the open field, eNOS-/- animals were less active than wild-type controls but showed unimpaired habituat...

The Morris water maze (MWM) is a commonly used apparatus for measuring visuo-spatial reference or working memory in rodents. In the reference memory task in our lab, mice are trained to locate a submerged platform in a circular pool filled with opaque water by using distal extra-maze visual cues. Learning in the MWM is typically assessed with measures of performance including latency and distan...