title: Modulation of gene expression in contextual fear conditioning in the rat.
abstract: In contextual fear conditioning (CFC) a single training leads to long-term memory of context-aversive electrical foot-shocks association. Mid-temporal regions of the brain of trained and naive rats were obtained 2 days after conditioning and screened by two-directional suppression subtractive hybridization. A pool of differentially expressed genes was identified and some of them were randomly selected and confirmed with qRT-PCR assay. These transcripts showed high homology for rat gene sequences coding for proteins involved in different cellular processes. The expression of the selected transcripts was also tested in rats which had freely explored the experimental apparatus (exploration) and in rats to which the same number of aversive shocks had been administered in the same apparatus, but temporally compressed so as to make the association between painful stimuli and the apparatus difficult (shock-only). Some genes resulted differentially expressed only in the rats subjected to CFC, others only in exploration or shock-only rats, whereas the gene coding for translocase of outer mitochondrial membrane 20 protein and nardilysin were differentially expressed in both CFC and exploration rats. For example, the expression of stathmin 1 whose transcripts resulted up regulated was also tested to evaluate the transduction and protein localization after conditioning.
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Ricerca Traslazionale e Delle Nuove Tecnologie in Medicina e Chirurgia, Unità di Fisiologia, Università di Pisa, Pisa, Italy.
authors.forename: Giuseppe
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Federighi
authors.forename: Giovanna
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Traina
authors.forename: Monica
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Macchi
authors.forename: Cristina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Ciampini
authors.forename: Rodolfo
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Bernardi
authors.forename: Elisabetta
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Baldi
authors.forename: Corrado
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Bucherelli
authors.forename: Marcello
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Brunelli
authors.forename: Rossana
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Scuri
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001483:Base Sequence; D015153:Blotting, Western; D003214:Conditioning, Classical; D017931:DNA Primers; D005239:Fear; D005455:Fluorescent Antibody Technique; D005786:Gene Expression Regulation; D008297:Male; D051381:Rats; D017208:Rats, Wistar; D060888:Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction
chemical_list: D017931:DNA Primers