Social isolation increased ADAR1 expressions leading to cognitive deficits of mice
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Animal Behavior, Biochemistry, Neuroscience, Toxicology, Pharmacology
- Keywords
- cognitive ability, ADAR1, social isolation
- Copyright
- © 2016 Chen et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Social isolation increased ADAR1 expressions leading to cognitive deficits of mice. PeerJ Preprints 4:e1997v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1997v1
Abstract
A lot of literature show that social isolation stress could be a key reason that leads to cognitive deficits for both humans and rodent models; however, the detailed mechanisms are still not clear completely. ADAR1 (Adenosine deaminase acting on RNA) is an enzyme involved in RNA editing that has a close relation to cognitive function. We hypothesize that social isolation stress may impact the expression of ADAR1, leading to cognitive deficits. To prove our hypothesis, we evaluated the cognition ability of the mice isolated for different durations (2, 4, and 8 weeks) using object recognition and object location tests; we also measured ADAR1 expressions in hippocampus and cortex using immunohistochemistry and western blot. Our study showed that social isolation stress significantly induced spatial and non-spatial cognition deficits. In addition, social isolation significantly increased both the immuno reactivity and protein expressions of ADAR1 in the hippocampus and frontal cortex. Furthermore, we found that adolescent re-socialization recovered not only the cognition deficits but also the increased ADAR1 protein expression in hippocampus and the increased number of ADAR1 positive cells in frontal cortex of the isolated mice. In conclusion, social isolation stress significantly increased ADAR1 expressions in the hippocampus and cortex, leading to cognitive deficits.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.