Barrett

Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.

Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.

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Using Transgenic Mice (APP/PS1) to Model Alzheimer’s Disease to Understand Hippocampal-Dependent Memory

Description

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is an irreversible brain disorder that plagues millions of people with no current cure. Current clinical research is slowly advancing to more definitive treatments in hopes of reducing the effects of progressive cognitive and behavioral decline, but none so far can slow AD’s onset. A brain area…

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is an irreversible brain disorder that plagues millions of people with no current cure. Current clinical research is slowly advancing to more definitive treatments in hopes of reducing the effects of progressive cognitive and behavioral decline, but none so far can slow AD’s onset. A brain area known as the nucleus incertus (NI) was recently discovered to potentially impact AD because of its connections to brain targets that degenerate; however, the NI’s role is unknown. This goal of this experiment was to use a transgenic mouse model (APP/PS1) that expresses AD pathology slowly as found in humans, and to test the mice in a variety of cognitive and anxiety assessments. Mice of both sexes and two different ages were used, with the first being young adult before AD pathology manifests (around 3-4 months old), and the second being around the cusp of when AD pathology manifests (late adult, 8-10 months old). The mice were tested in a variety of cognitive tasks that included the novel object recognition (NOR), Morris water maze (MWM), and the object placement (OP), with the latter being the focus of my thesis. Anxiety measures were taken from the open field (OF) and elevated plus maze (EPM) with the visible platform (VP) used to ensure mice could perform on the rigorous MWM task. In the OP, we found an age effect, where the older mice were less likely to explore the moved object during the OP compared to the younger mice; motor ability was unlikely to explain this effect. We did not find any significant age by genotype effects. These findings indicate that cognitive impairment only just started to affect the older cohort, since OP impairment was found on one measure and not another. Other measures currently being quantified will be helpful in understanding this data, and to see whether learning, memory, and anxiety are affected.
ContributorsDapon, Bianca (Author) / Conrad, Cheryl (Thesis director) / Bimonte-Nelson, Heather (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2023-05

Utilization of Deep Neural Networks to Investigate Sex-Dependent and Cerebellar Modulation Impacts on Social Behavior in Mice

Description
The cerebellum is recognized for its role in motor movement, balance, and more recently, social behavior. Cerebellar injury at birth and during critical periods reduces social preference in animal models and increases the risk of autism in humans. Social behavior is commonly assessed with the three-chamber test, where a mouse…

The cerebellum is recognized for its role in motor movement, balance, and more recently, social behavior. Cerebellar injury at birth and during critical periods reduces social preference in animal models and increases the risk of autism in humans. Social behavior is commonly assessed with the three-chamber test, where a mouse travels between chambers that contain a conspecific and an object confined under a wire cup. However, this test is unable to quantify interactive behaviors between pairs of mice, which could not be tracked until the recent development of machine learning programs that track animal behavior. In this study, both the three-chamber test and a novel freely-moving social interaction test assessed social behavior in untreated male and female mice, as well as in male mice injected with hM3Dq (excitatory) DREADDs. In the three-chamber test, significant differences were found in the time spent (female: p < 0.05, male: p < 0.001) and distance traveled (female: p < 0.05, male: p < 0.001) in the chamber with the familiar conspecific, compared to the chamber with the object, for untreated male, untreated female, and mice with activated hM3Dq DREADDs. A social memory test was added, where the object was replaced with a novel mouse. Untreated male mice spent significantly more time (p < 0.05) and traveled a greater distance (p < 0.05) in the chamber with the novel mouse, while male mice with activated hM3Dq DREADDs spent more time (p<0.05) in the chamber with the familiar conspecific. Data from the freely-moving social interaction test was used to calculate freely-moving interactive behaviors between pairs of mice and interactions with an object. No sex differences were found, but mice with excited hM3Dq DREADDs engaged in significantly more anogenital sniffing (p < 0.05) and side-side contact (p < 0.05) behaviors. All these results indicate how machine learning allows for nuanced insights into how both sex and chemogenetic excitation impact social behavior in freely-moving mice.
ContributorsNelson, Megan (Author) / Verpeut, Jessica (Thesis director) / Bimonte-Nelson, Heather (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor)
Created2024-05