Behavioral recovery after transplantation into a rat model of Huntington's disease: dependence on anatomical connectivity and extensive postoperative training.
Rats were trained to perform a conditioned stimulus-response task known to be sensitive to striatal damage, after which they received unilateral excitotoxic striatal lesions. The subsequent implantation of graft tissue into the lesioned striatum was either immediate (9 days) or substantially delayed (70 days). When retested 14 weeks later, all graft and lesion rats were equally impaired initially and biased their responding toward the ipsilateral side. Graft-associated recovery was evident with repeated postoperative testing, but only in rats that had received transplants 9 days postlesion. It is suggested that this training-dependent, graft-associated recovery is mediated specifically by the restored host-graft connections.
Brasted
P J
PJ
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Watts
C
C
Torres
E M
EM
Robbins
T W
TW
Dunnett
S B
SB
D000818:Animals; D001931:Brain Mapping; D016380:Brain Tissue Transplantation / Q000502:physiology*; D003342:Corpus Striatum / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000637:transplantation*; D004292:Dominance, Cerebral / Q000502:physiology; D006816:Huntington Disease / Q000503:physiopathology*; D008297:Male; D009415:Nerve Net / Q000503:physiopathology*; D009416:Nerve Regeneration / Q000502:physiology*; D051381:Rats; D011919:Rats, Inbred Strains