Project description:Early-life stress has been linked to multiple neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric deficits. Our previous studies have linked maternal presence/absence from the nest in developing rat pups to changes in prefrontal cortex activity. Furthermore, we have shown that these changes are modulated by serotonergic signaling. Here we test whether changes in prefrontal cortex activity during early-life affect the developing cortex leading to behavioral alterations in the adult. We show that inhibiting the prefrontal cortex of mouse pups leads to cognitive deficits in the adult comparable to those seen following maternal separation. Moreover, we show that activating the prefrontal cortex during maternal separation can prevent these behavioral deficits. To test how maternal separation affects the transcriptional profile of the prefrontal cortex we performed single-nucleus RNA sequencing. Maternal separation lead to differential gene expression almost exclusively in inhibitory neurons. Among others, we found changes in GABAergic and serotonergic pathways in these interneurons. Interestingly, both maternal separation and early-life prefrontal cortex inhibition led to changes in physiological responses in prefrontal activity to GABAergic and serotonergic antagonists that were similar to the responses of more immature brains. Prefrontal activation during maternal separation prevented these changes. These data point to a crucial role of prefrontal cortex activity during early-life in behavioral expression in adulthood
Project description:Exposure to early stress (ES) is known to enhance adult vulnerability for anxiety and depressive behaviors. The molecular and cellular pathways altered in response to ES that contribute to the establishment of a substrate for susceptibility to adult psychopathology are not well understood. Focusing on the prefrontal cortex (PFC), a brain region implicated in the modulation of emotional responses, we examined the consequences of the early stress experience of maternal separation (MS) on the adult PFC transcriptome. Microarray analysis identified alterations in genes associated with signal transduction, neuronal excitability, G-protein signaling and stress responses in the PFC of adult animals previously exposed to ES. Our results also indicated that the pattern of gene expression changes observed in ES animals contains a component in common with that induced by 5-HT2A/C receptor stimulation in control animals, suggesting enhanced 5-HT2A/C receptor-mediated signaling in ES animals. Further, our microarray results reveal that a history of ES alters the DOI-induced transcriptome in the PFC.