Project description:Early-life stress sensitizes individuals to subsequent stressors to increase lifetime risk for psychiatric disorders. Within the ventral tegmental area (VTA), a mesolimbic brain region implicated in stress response and mental health, early-life stress causes long-lasting changes in gene expression and chromatin modifications that in turn cause latent physiological and behavioral sensitivity to stress. These molecular consequences of early-life stress are indicative of epigenetic priming, a form of molecular memory in which developmental or environmental cues open chromatin at enhancers to facilitate transcriptional response to stimuli. However, the long term impact of early-life stress on chromatin architecture in the VTA was not yet known. Using a combination of activity-dependent cellular tagging and ATAC-sequencing, we find that early-life stress opens chromatin specifically in stress-activated cells of the VTA, that this remodeling persists into adulthood, and that opening chromatin at cis-regulatory elements including enhancers augments transcriptional response to adult stress. Together, this data supports enhancer priming within ELS-responsive cells in the VTA as a biological mechanism for lifelong stress sensitivity.
Project description:We performed expression analysis of 7-10 zygotes after natural mating of superovulated JaxJ naive primiparous females and males that have undergone early life stress.
Project description:In this study we hypothesize that early life stress perturbs the normal function of microglial in the developing hippocampus and that this effect is responsible for the ability of early life tress to disrupt normal synaptic maturation, myelination, and axonal growth in the developing hippocampus. To test this hypothesis we used the mouse immune panel from NanoString in order to identify immune-related genes whose expression is modified by BDS, a mouse model of early life stress, in microglia isolated from the hippocampus of 28-day old male pups. This project is part of a manuscript that is currently under preparation (Delpech J.C. et al. Early life stress perturbs the maturation of microglia in the developing hippocampus, Brain, Behavior and Immunity, 2016)
Project description:In this study we hypothesize that early life stress perturbs the normal function of microglia in the developing hippocampus and that this effect is responsible for the ability of early life tress to disrupt normal synaptic maturation, myelination, and axonal growth in the developing hippocampus. To test this hypothesis we used the mouse immune panel from NanoString in order to identify immune-related genes whose expression is modified by BDS, a mouse model of early life stress, in microglia isolated from the hippocampus of 14-day old male pups. This project is part of a manuscript that is currently under preparation (Delpech J.C. et al. Early life stress perturbs the maturation of microglia in the developing hippocampus, Brain, Behavior and Immunity, 2016)
Project description:This study explored the interaction of early life and adult stress on transcriptional and chromosomal states in a 2x2 design. Male and female mice were subjected to early life stress (ELS) or were standard-reared (Std), were housed normally through adolescence, and were then exposed to 10 days of control (Ctl) or chronic social defeat stress (CSDS: males only) or 3 days of sub-threshold variable stress (STVS: females only) conditions in adulthood. Long-lasting transcriptional alterations were assessed in the ventral tegmental area (VTA), nucleus accumbens (NAc), medial prefrontal cortex (PFC), and ventral hippocampus (HIP, males only) in adulthood.
Project description:Early-life prefrontal cortex inhibition and early-life stress lead to long-lasting behavioral, transcriptional, and physiological impairments
