Cognition, Behavior, and Memory
Author: Soledad Picco | Email: mc.krawczyk1985@gmail.com
Soledad Picco 2°, Jimena Santos 2°, Candela Medina 1°, M. Eugenia Pedreira 2°, Mariano M Boccia 1°, Rodrigo Fernández 2°, Maria C Krawczyk 1°
1° Laboratorio de Neurofarmacología de Procesos de Memoria, Cátedra de Farmacología, Facultad de Farmacia y Bioquímica UBA.
2° Instituto de Fisiología, Biología Molecular y Neurociencias (IFIBYNE), UBA-CONICET.
Physical exercise is known to have beneficial effects on general health and wellbeing in humans and it is also related to neuronal plasticity, increasing neurogenesis and consequently leading to improvements in processes such as learning and memory. In this sense, wheel running performance in mice appears as an extensively used behavioral approach for neurobiological studies. On the other hand, knowledge of sex-related running profiles of laboratory mice is certainly useful for biomedical research looking at the effect of physical exercise on specific physiological aspects that are assessed in each particular experiment. With this in mind, we looked into the effects of exercise in the consolidation of an aversive memory in female and male CF-1 mice. Animals trained in the Inhibitory Avoidance task received one of two different footshock intensities (0.3 or 0.4 mA) and immediately after were allowed to run in a plastic mouse running wheel. Running effects on memory consolidation were evaluated 48 h after the training session. Preliminary results show that exposure to the wheel after a training session of an aversive memory can negatively modulate mice’s long-term performance, depending on the amount of running time. Nevertheless, no changes in memory performances were observed if animals were placed in the wheel-cages 3h post training, suggesting that engaging in wheel-running has no nonspecific impact on the memory consolidation of an IA task in mice.