Adult Hippocampal Neurogenesis Paper

Adult hippocampal neurogenesis especially in the dentate gyrus is a unique form of neural circuit plasticity that results in the generation of new neurons in this region throughout life. Neurogenesis is not a rapid process, throughout it a neuron needs to be born and then implemented, and incorporated into an entire network which can take a long time. Neurogenesis is supposed to change the function of hippocampus over a person’s lifetime and therefore adult neurogenesis is different than an infant. This paper shows that there can be an improvement in the performance of specific cognitive tasks, such as distinguishing between two similar objects by enhancing the survival of the adult-born neuronal population. Furthermore, they stimulated the …show more content…
About 60 to 80% of young adult–born neurons undergo a programmed cell death due to the required pro-apoptotic Bax gene. The transgenic mice used in this paper has TAM regulated recombinase CreER T2 expressed in it under the control of Nestin promoter fragment and a Bax conditional mouse. This allows Bax selectivity in the neuronal stem of the adult brain. When examining the adult hippocampal neurogenesis in mice with one Nestin CreER T2 (NCff) and two loxP-flanked Bax alleles (Bax f/f) that have TAM injection (iBaxNes) or injected with vehicle which is referred as control, it showed similar levels of cell proliferation in the dentate …show more content…
It is believed that depressed people have an abnormality in neurogenesis and these tests were performed to see the specificity of the behavior. The effects are visible only on that specific behavior and not on every behavior. As a control, TAM treatment of Bax(f/f) mice has no effect on anxiety-like and/or depression-like