Matching Items (3)
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- All Subjects: Behavior
- Creators: Sanabria, Federico
Description
Patients with schizophrenia have impaired cognitive flexibility, as evidenced by behaviors of perseveration. Cognitive impairments may be due to dysregulation of glutamate and/or loss of neuronal plasticity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). The purpose of these studies was to examine the effects of mGluR5 positive allosteric modulators (PAMs) alone and in combination with the NMDAR antagonist MK-801, a pharmacological model of schizophrenia. An operant-based cognitive set-shifting task was utilized to assess cognitive flexibility, in vivo microdialysis procedures to measure extracellular glutamate levels in the mPFC, and diolistic labeling to assess the effects on dendritic spine density and morphology in the mPFC. Results revealed that chronic administration of the mGluR5 PAM CDPPB was able to significantly reduce the effects of chronically administered MK-801 on both behavioral perseveration and glutamate neurotransmission. Results also showed that CDPPB had no evidence of an effect on dendritic spine density or morphology, but the mGluR5 negative allosteric modulator fenobam caused significant increases in spine density and the frequency of occurrence of spines with smaller head diameters. Conclusions include that CDPPB is able to reverse MK-801 induced cognitive deficits as well as alterations in mPFC glutamate neurochemistry. The culmination of these studies add further support for targeting mGluR5 with PAMs as a novel mechanism to alleviate cognitive impairments in patients with schizophrenia.
ContributorsLaCrosse, Amber (Author) / Olive, Michael (Committee member) / Gallitano-Mendel, Amelia (Committee member) / Sanabria, Federico (Committee member) / Hammer, Ronald (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Urbanization rapidly alters the environment, leading to a decrease in biodiversity in urban areas. A challenge associated with urbanized areas is the increased heat caused by the urban heat island effect. Heat may have an important impact on arthropods particularly due to their status as ectotherms. Animal behavior reveals how individuals interact with their environment. A behavioral syndrome describes consistent individual differences in behaviors that are correlated across different behavioral contexts or situations. Understanding the Western Black Widow's behavioral responses to the urban heat island effect has important implications for the control of a pest species. In this study, the relationship between rising urban temperatures and voracity, web-building, and cannibalism behaviors of juvenile Western Black Widows was examined. Spiders raised in the urban temperature treatment were predicted to have more aggressive behavioral syndromes, characterized by shorter latencies to forage, greater web-building activity, and shorter latencies to cannibalize as compared to spiders raised in rural or intermediate temperature treatments. A correlation between the latency to attack the first fly and second fly was found, however there were no other correlations evidencing a behavioral syndrome. Temperature was found to affect foraging, web-building, and cannibalism behaviors where spiders in urban areas demonstrated increased activity in all behavioral contexts. The possession of behavioral plasticity rather than a behavioral syndrome is likely what allows Black Widows to be successful urban pests.
ContributorsGarver, Emily Elizabeth (Author) / Johnson, James Chadwick (Thesis director) / Foltz-Sweat, Jennifer (Committee member) / Kitchen, Kathryn (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
Stress activates physiological systems within the body to protect oneself against the potential harmful effects of enduring long-term stress. Past studies have shown that structures involved in timing are implicated in a number of psychological disorders and further are sensitive to stress. In this experiment, Sprague Dawley rats are trained to perform a perspective timing task and are then exposed to twice-daily chronic variable stress for 21 days. Behavioral data are collected, followed by post-mortem tissue analysis of the PFC, hippocampus, and striatum. This study aims to examine the morphological changes in key brain regions such as the hippocampus that appear to be involved in interval timing. Additionally, this study aims to confirm that dendritic complexity in the hippocampus produces consistent data using a classic Sholl analysis versus using a virtual image-stacking software, Neurostackr. The results of this study demonstrate that the expected Gaussian graph produced from a classic Sholl analysis was produced from both a long-shaft and short-shaft neuron found in the hippocampus using the virtual technology. These findings verify that a virtual image-stacking software and Sholl analysis will suffice in place of the traditional method of hand traced neurons on a transparent sheet with concentric circles to count bifurcation points. This virtual method ultimately reduces cost, improves timeliness of data collection, and eliminates some of the subjectivity of human error.
ContributorsGarcia, Jasmine Brooke (Author) / Sanabria, Federico (Thesis director) / Gupta, Tanya (Committee member) / School of Molecular Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05