RATIONALE Evidence suggests that 4 weeks of voluntary wheel running abolishes conditioned place preference (CPP) for cocaine in male C57BL/6J mice. OBJECTIVES To determine the duration and timing of exposure to running wheels necessary to reduce CPP, and the extent to which the running per se influences CPP as compared to environmental enrichment without running. METHODS A total of 239 male...

In recent years, an increasing number of farmers are choosing to keep their cows indoors throughout the year. Indoor housing of cows allows farmers to provide high-yielding individuals with a nutritionally balanced diet fit for their needs, and it has important welfare benefits for both cows and their calves, such as protection from predators, parasites, and exposure to extreme weather conditio...

Lifelong cognitive stimulation is associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD), but causality is difficult to prove. We therefore sought to investigate the preventative potential of environmental enrichment (EE) using mice expressing both human mutant presenilin-1 and the amyloid precursor protein (PS1/PDAPP). At weaning, mice were placed into either an enriched or standard housing ...

The brain's life-long capacity for experience-dependent plasticity allows adaptation to new environments or to changes in the environment, and to changes in internal brain states such as occurs in brain damage. Since the initial discovery by Hebb (1947) that environmental enrichment (EE) was able to confer improvements in cognitive behavior, EE has been investigated as a powerful form of experi...

Rett syndrome, commonly associated with mutations of the methyl CpG-binding protein 2 (MECP2) gene, is characterised by an apparently normal early postnatal development followed by deterioration of acquired cognitive and motor coordination skills in early childhood. To evaluate whether environmental factors may influence the disease outcome of Rett syndrome, we tested the effect of environmenta...

Environmental enrichment has become increasingly utilized in rodent models of aging and neurodegenerative disease in order to prevent or reverse cognitive decline and neuronal dysfunction. However, the potential application of this body of work to human cognitive aging has rarely been discussed. The present article provides an overview of the rodent research that has tested the effects of envir...

A selective enrichment procedure, using two new selective media, was developed to isolate Pasteurella multocida from wild birds and environmental samples. These media were developed by testing 15 selective agents with six isolates of P. multocida from wild avian origin and seven other bacteria representing genera frequently found in environmental and avian samples. The resulting media--Pasteure...

Background: Huntington's disease (HD) is a neurodegenerative disorder predominantly affecting the cerebral cortex and striatum. Transgenic mice (R6/1 line), expressing a CAG repeat encoding an expanded polyglutamine tract in the N-terminus of the huntingtin protein, closely model HD. We have previously shown that environmental enrichment of these HD mice delays the onset of motor deficits. Furt...

Citation: Martínez-Canabal A (2015) Rewiring, forgetting and learning. Commentary: A critical period for experience-dependent remodeling of adult-born neuron connectivity. Thirty years after the discovery that neurons are generated in the adult brain (Altman and Das, 1965), studies of the link between hippocampal neurogenesis and behavior revealed that exercise and environmental enrichment are ...