Variation in early life maternal care predicts later long range frontal cortex synapse development in mice.

ABSTRACT: Empirical and theoretical work suggests that early postnatal experience may inform later developing synaptic connectivity to adapt the brain to its environment. We hypothesized that early maternal experience may program the development of synaptic density on long range frontal cortex projections. To test this idea, we used maternal separation (MS) to generate environmental variability and examined how MS affected 1) maternal care and 2) synapse density on virally-labeled long range axons of offspring reared in MS or control conditions. We found that MS and variation in maternal care predicted bouton density on dorsal frontal cortex axons that terminated in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) and dorsomedial striatum (DMS) with more, fragmented care associated with higher density. The effects of

SUBMITTER: Thomas AW 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6994474 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature