Rapid ReportChronic behavioral stress induces apical dendritic reorganization in pyramidal neurons of the medial prefrontal cortex
Section snippets
Experimental procedures
All procedures were conducted in accordance with the Rockefeller University and Mount Sinai School of Medicine Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. Male Sprague–Dawley rats (Charles River, Wilmington, MA, USA; 250–280 g) received restraint stress (n=6) for 6 h daily (10:00–16:00 h) with wire mesh restrainers and then returned to their home cages. Another group of unstressed controls (n=5) received no treatment. Restraint stress was performed daily for 21 days. To ensure that the
Results
Intracellular injections of LY into layer II/III pyramidal neurons in the ACC and PL cortices revealed the complete filling of apical and basal dendrites with dendritic spines throughout the entire extent of the dendritic tree (Fig. 1). LY injections were performed at a depth of 10–50 μm below the dorsal surface of the sections. Since brains were postfixed for only 2 h, there was minimal tissue shrinkage relative to standard histological and immunocytochemical procedures. All apical dendritic
Discussion
The main findings of the present study were that chronic behavioral stress induced significant decreases in the total length and number of branches on apical dendrites of pyramidal neurons in the ACC and PL of rats. Moreover, these overall reductions were manifested by decreases in branching pattern complexity in the proximal-to-medial portions of apical dendritic arbors. This study represents a departure from the Golgi impregnation method that has been used in many previous studies that
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by NIH grant MH58911. We thank W. G. M. Janssen for expert technical assistance.
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