TY - JOUR T1 - Maternal Immune Activation Alters Adult Behavior, Gut Microbiome and Juvenile Brain Oscillations in Ferrets JF - eneuro JO - eNeuro DO - 10.1523/ENEURO.0313-18.2018 SP - ENEURO.0313-18.2018 AU - Yuhui Li AU - Supritha R. Dugyala AU - Travis S. Ptacek AU - John H. Gilmore AU - Flavio Frohlich Y1 - 2018/09/26 UR - http://www.eneuro.org/content/early/2018/09/26/ENEURO.0313-18.2018.abstract N2 - Maternal immune activation (MIA) has been identified as a causal factor in psychiatric disorders by epidemiological studies in humans and mechanistic studies in rodent models. Addressing this gap in species between mice and human will accelerate the understanding of the role of MIA in the etiology of psychiatric disorders. Here we provide the first study of MIA in the ferret (Mustela putorius furo), an animal model with a rich history of developmental investigations due to the similarities in developmental programs and cortical organization with primates. We found that after MIA by injection of PolyIC in the pregnant mother animal, the adult offspring exhibited reduced social behavior, less eye-contact with humans, decreased recognition memory, a sex-specific increase in amphetamine-induced hyperlocomotion, and altered gut microbiome. We also studied the neurophysiological properties of the MIA ferrets in development by in-vivo recordings of the local field potential (LFP) from visual cortex in 5-6 weeks old animals, and found that the spontaneous and sensory-evoked LFP had decreased power, especially in the gamma frequency band. Overall, our results provide the first evidence for the detrimental effect of MIA in ferrets support the use of the ferret as an intermediate model species for the study of disorders with neurodevelopmental origin.Significance Statement Maternal immune activation (MIA) has been adopted in the rodent model to study neurodevelopmental disorders such as schizophrenia. Yet, neurodevelopmental programs differ quite substantially between mice and humans. The ferret has a rich history for the study of neurodevelopment due to its unique advantages that combine short gestation time with the emergence of sophisticated cortical organization during development. The present study found that MIA leads to a range of behavioral abnormalities as well as altered gut microbiome in adult ferrets. Notably, we observed impaired brain oscillations in these animals in early development. Our results lay the foundation for the translational study of neurodevelopmental disorders in ferrets. ER -