Christa Zianni | 2024 I.S. Symposium

Name: Christa Zianni
Title: Short-Term vs Long-Term Effects of DREADDs in the Mouse Motor Cortex
Major: Neuroscience
Minors: Spanish; Mathematics
Advisors: Alfredo Zúñiga, Susan Clayton (second reader)

Thousands of Americans are impacted every year by disorders affecting the primary motor cortex, but studying these conditions can be quite difficult due to their complexity. There are, however, new techniques, such as designer receptors exclusively activated by designer drugs (DREADDs), that show promise in helping to understand conditions impacting this brain region. DREADDs is a technique that allows for targeted activation of specific cell populations using the drug clozapine N-oxide. It is a method that has become popular in recent years, but despite the growing number of studies utilizing DREADDs, there is a paucity of research looking at their long-term effects, particularly in the motor cortex. This study sought to compare the acute and chronic effects of excitatory DREADDs activation in the motor cortex of mice using the open field maze. DREADDs were expressed in the primary motor cortex of 11 C57BL/6 mice via stereotaxic injection, then behavior in the open field maze was measured after one day of DREADDs activation and again after 14 days of DREADDs activation. It was found that acute DREADDs activation had no effect on activity levels or anxiety and chronic DREADDs activation had no effect on anxiety, but activity levels decreased after chronic activation of DREADDs. These results show how the effects of DREADDs can differ in the long-term compared to the short term and emphasize the need to study long-term effects in order to gain a more complete understanding of how DREADDs, as well as the brain more broadly, work..

Posted in Symposium 2024 on April 22, 2024.