Treatment With 1g / L Mpl For 5 Days Animals - 1714 Words

Following treatment with 1g/L MPL for 5 days animals still show an intact ability to learn, this is clearly demonstrated in both the novel object location task and the novel object preference task. In both these tasks with a 1-hour delay between the acquisition and the test phase, animals are able to distinguish between the novel and familiar objects. This establishes that processes required for learning are intact. The supplementary data illustrates that in these adult animals treated with 1g/L MPL for 5 days LTP is still intact, therefore the molecular basis for the early phase of memory acquisition is intact. Treatment with MPL does not impair the ability to learn and remember previously observed objects in the shorter term. At the†¦show more content†¦Late-phase LTP (L-LTP) The 6-hour time point was added as a second experiment to try to unpick a reason for the deficit seen at 24-hours. Again at the 6-hour time point in both the novel object location task and the novel object preference task there is impairment in the animals treated with MPL ability to distinguish between novel and familiar. This indicates that there is a change occurring by the 6-hour time point in some part of the memory. The treatment with 1g/L MPL for 5 days is causing a change that impacts either the consolidation or retrieval of knowledge at these longer time points. The fact that at a 1-hour delay there is no deficit would suggest that treatment with 1g/L MPL for 5 days does not impair the acquisition phase of learning. So animals have intact acquisition, which led to the question of what was causing the impairment at the 6-hour and 24-hour time points? Firstly we can rule out lack of exploration. Animals must spend a minimum of 15s exploring objects in the acquisition phase and a minimum of 10s exploration in the test phase. If animals were not to meet either of these minimum requirements they would not be included in the data analysis as it is viewed that they have not explored enough to be able to distinguish between novel and familiar. This would also remove animals that do not look at the objects or any if they were to freeze through