Time-lapse study of fos expression in pre-mammillary nucleus of hypothalamus.

• Main Author: Yolanda Aphrilia Setiagani.
• Other Authors: School of Biological Sciences
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: DRNTU::Science::Biological sciences::Human anatomy and physiology::Neurobiology; DRNTU::Science::Biological sciences::Molecular biology
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/45105
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Chronic infection by Toxoplasmosis gondii had been shown to cause behavioral manipulation of its host. In the case of toxoplasmosis in rats, the rats become attracted to cats, their natural predators which also act as definitive hosts to the parasite. A hypothesis about leakiness of neural circuits, which assume that ‘column’ hypothesis stands in its argument on social behavior generation, tried to explain this manipulation. This study aimed to prove whether the ‘leakiness of neural circuits’ hypothesis stood. In a time lapse behavioral study, two types of stimuli were given to 16 adult male rats, one was cat urine, the other was female rat urine. A standardized two-epoch catFISH procedure was performed on sliced brain samples collected from the subjects. c-fos was used as neuronal activity marker. Double fluorescence-conjugated antibody labeling was done to label both cFos mRNA and cFos protein. Neural circuit activations were observed in MeApd, MeApv, VMHdm and VMHvl. Statistical analyses on the differences of level activation in these regions indicated that they were hardly significant. With size of analyzed sample=3, the results were yet to be conclusive. However, there could be small possibility that the results showed some positivity towards ‘social behavior network’ hypothesis.