In the present study, the effect of treadmill exercise on short-term memory, apoptotic neuronal cell death, and cell proliferation in the hippocampal dentate gyrus following transient global ischemia in gerbils was investigated. Step-down inhibitory avoidance task, terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase-mediated dUTP nick end labeling (TUNEL) assay, and immunohistochemistry for caspase-3 and 5-b...

Selective synapse development determines how complex neuronal networks in the brain are formed. Complexes of postsynaptic neuroligins and LRRTMs with presynaptic neurexins contribute widely to excitatory synapse development, and mutations in these gene families increase the risk of developing psychiatric disorders. We find that LRRTM4 has distinct presynaptic binding partners, heparan sulfate p...

Pattern separation, the process of transforming similar representations or memories into highly dissimilar, nonoverlapping representations, is a key component of many functions ascribed to the hippocampus. Computational models have stressed the role of the hippocampus and, in particular, the dentate gyrus and its projections into the CA3 subregion in pattern separation. We used high-resolution ...

Patients with temporal lobe epilepsy display neuron loss in the hilus of the dentate gyrus. This has been proposed to be epileptogenic by a variety of different mechanisms. The present study examines the specificity and extent of neuron loss in the dentate gyrus of kainate-treated rats, a model of temporal lobe epilepsy. Kainate-treated rats lose an average of 52% of their GAD-negative hilar ne...

Possible involvement of the amygdaloid input in long-term potentiation (LTP) in the medial perforant path-dentate gyrus granule cell synapses in vivo was investigated by evaluating the effects of lesions of the amygdaloid nucleus. The dentate gyrus synaptic potential evoked by low-frequency test stimulation did not change following lesions of the basolateral and central amygdala. However, when ...

We have studied entorhinal cortex lesion-induced sprouting in the hippocampus in young, adult, and aged control and transgenic Alzheimer's disease model mice. The entorhinal cortex was unilaterally, partially lesioned, and four weeks later the subsequent axonal sprouting in dentate gyrus was analyzed. Our data demonstrate that young and adult, control and amyloid-beta protein precursor (AbetaPP...

Recent studies have demonstrated that mice lacking protein L-isoaspartate (D-aspartate) O-methyltransferase (Pcmt1-/- mice) have alterations in the insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I) and insulin receptor pathways within the hippocampal formation as well as other brain regions. However, the cellular localization of these changes and whether the alterations might be associated with an increase ...

Hippocampal injury-associated learning and memory deficits are frequent hallmarks of brain trauma and are the most enduring and devastating consequences following traumatic brain injury (TBI). Several reports, including our recent paper, showed that TBI brought on by a moderate level of controlled cortical impact (CCI) induces immature newborn neuron death in the hippocampal dentate gyrus. In c...