Bisphenol A, used in the production of plastic, is able to leach from containers into food and cause multidirectional adverse effects in living organisms, including neurodegeneration and metabolic disorders. Knowledge of the impact of BPA on enteric neurons is practically non-existent. The destination of this study was to investigate the influence of BPA at a specific dose (0.05 mg/kg body weig...

Opioid-induced constipation is a major side effect that persists with long-term opioid use. Previous studies demonstrated that nicotine-induced contractions are enhanced after long-term morphine exposure in guinea pig ileum. In the present study, we examined whether the increased sensitivity to nicotine could be observed in single enteric neurons after long-term morphine exposure, determined th...

Enteric neurons express oxytocin (OT); moreover, enteric neurons and enterocytes express developmentally regulated OT receptors (OTRs). Although OT (with secretin) opposes intestinal inflammation, physiological roles played by enteric OT/OTR signaling have not previously been determined. We tested hypotheses that OT/OTR signaling contributes to enteric nervous system (ENS)-related gastrointesti...

The myenteric plexus of the enteric nervous system controls the movement of smooth muscles in the gastrointestinal system. They extend their axons between two peripheral smooth muscle layers to form a tubular meshwork arborizing the gut wall. How a tubular axonal meshwork becomes established without invading centrally toward the gut epithelium has not been addressed. We provide evidence here th...

BACKGROUND & AIMS High-fat diet (HFD) feeding is associated with gastrointestinal motility disorders. We recently reported delayed colonic motility in mice fed a HFD mice for 11 weeks. In this study, we investigated the contributing role of gut microbiota in HFD-induced gut dysmotility. METHODS Male C57BL/6 mice were fed a HFD (60% kcal fat) or a regular/control diet (RD) (18% kcal fat) for 1...

One of the challenges of using imaging techniques as a tool to study cellular physiology has been the inability to resolve structures that are not located near the surface of the preparation. Nonlinear optical microscopy, in particular two photon-excited fluorescence microscopy (2PM), has overcome this limitation, providing deeper optical penetration (several hundred µm) in ex vivo and in vivo ...