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Acta Physiologica 2011; Volume 203, Supplement 688
The 62nd National Congress of the Italian Physiological Society
9/25/2011-9/27/2011
Sorrento, Italy
EARLY IMPAIRMENT OF LONG-TERM DEPRESSION IN THE PERIRHINAL CORTEX OF TG2576 MICE
Abstract number: P46
TAMAGNINI1 F, BURATTINI1 C, CASOLI2 T, BALIETTI2,3 M, FATTORETTI2,3 P, AICARDI1,4 G
1Dept of Human and General Physiology, Univ. of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
2Neurobiology of Aging Laboratory and
3Cellular Bioenergetics Laboratory, INRCA Scientific Technological Area, Ancona, Italy
4Interdepartmental Centre Luigi Galvani for the Study of Biophysics, Bioinformatics and Biocomplexity, Univ. of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
The Tg2576 Alzheimer's disease (AD) mouse line shows a marked increase in amyloid-b (Ab) 140 and Ab142 in the plasma and brain by 35 months of age, decrease in spine density in the dentate gyrus at 4 months, decline in long-term potentiation of synaptic transmission in the dentate gyrus associated with impairment in contextual fear conditioning by 5 months, and plaque deposition in brain starting at 8 months. Visual recognition memory is seriously impaired in patients in the early stages of AD. The perirhinal cortex (Prh), a multimodal associative cortex of the temporal lobe, is critically involved in this form of memory; long-term depression of synaptic transmission (LTD) in this cortical region is regarded as its cellular correlate. The present work was aimed at evaluating if LTD in Prh of Tg2576 mice is already compromised at 3 months of age. Field excitatory post-synaptic potentials evoked by afferent pathways stimulation were recorded in layer II/III of Prh in horizontal brain slices obtained from 3 month old Tg2576 mice and littermate controls. We found that a single train of 3000 pulses delivered at 5 Hz induced LTD in slices from control mice, but not in those from Tg2576 mice. This result is consistent with the early visual recognition impairment observed in AD patients, and is particularly interesting because no changes in synaptic plasticity have previously been found so early in this transgenic line.
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Acta Physiologica 2011; Volume 203, Supplement 688 :P46