title: Environmental enrichment facilitates long-term potentiation in embryonic striatal grafts.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Housing animals in an enriched environment improves motor and cognitive performance and anatomical connectivity in rodent lesion models of Huntington disease and transplantation of embryonic striatal grafts.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  The authors evaluate the extent to which environmental enrichment can modify synaptic plasticity in the host-graft neuronal circuitry to try to find a physiological substrate for the observed improvements.
  
  
  METHODS
  C57BL/6 mice, housed in enriched or standard environments, received unilateral quinolinic acid lesions of the striatum, followed by embryonic striatal grafts. Then, 3 months posttransplantation, synaptic physiology and plasticity were evaluated by extracellular recording from in vitro striatal slices.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Environmental enrichment had no effect on the chance of long-term depression (LTD) induction or expression of LTD from either normal or grafted striatum. In contrast, enrichment increased the chance of long-term potentiation (LTP) induction and level of expression associated with increased levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor within both the intact and grafted striatum compared with levels in the striatum of animals housed in standard environments.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Environmental enrichment induces changes in host-graft corticostriatal LTP, thus providing a potential physiological substrate for the enrichment-induced improvement in motor and cognitive performance. The effect may be mediated by modulation of the trophic environment in which the grafted cells develop and integrate.
authors: School of Life Sciences, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK. Mazzocchi-JonesD@Brookes.ac.uk
authors: David
authors: D
authors: Mazzocchi-Jones
authors: Máté
authors: M
authors: Döbrössy
authors: Stephen B
authors: SB
authors: Dunnett
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D003342:Corpus Striatum / Q000196:embryology* / Q000601:surgery / Q000637:transplantation*; D004195:Disease Models, Animal; D004780:Environment, Controlled; D016332:Fetal Tissue Transplantation / Q000379:methods*; D006085:Graft Survival / Q000502:physiology; D017774:Long-Term Potentiation / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D051379:Mice; D008810:Mice, Inbred C57BL; D008822:Mice, Transgenic; D009473:Neuronal Plasticity / Q000502:physiology; D009924:Organ Culture Techniques