(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-12)
Patel, Shivany
Inflammation can lead to a suite of behavioral changes known as sickness behaviors, which have been implicated in the etiology of chronic inflammatory disease. Here, we examine the role of acute and chronic induction of inflammation on vasopressin (AVP) expression in the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus (PVN) of female mice. To test, adult female C57B6/J mice were injected with lipopolysaccharide (LPS) at two different dosages and schedules to induce acute (1.0mg/kg, once) and chronic (0.25mg/kg LPS, eight times) inflammatory responses. The acute dose has previously been demonstrated to induce sickness behaviors, as measured by the open field test and a social interaction test; however, these measures were unaffected by the chronic administration of LPS. AVP mRNA expression in the PVN was measured using fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) and fluorescent microscopy. Both the acute and chronic administration of LPS resulted in an increase in PVN AVP expression without a change in the area of this expression. This increase in AVP in the PVN occurred despite the lack of sickness behavior, suggesting that further work is necessary to characterize the role of AVP in the PVN in these chronic and acute inflammatory responses.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-05)
Abdulhameed, Sarah Qussai
Quasi Periodic Patterns are a way of finding reoccurring patterns in brain imaging data. In this experiment, researchers were interested in examining how similar QPPs were in various cognitive processes. In order to execute this, researchers put participants in an fMRI scanner and obtain functional brain images as they conducted a 0-back task, a 2-back task, flanker task, and a resting state scan. It was hypothesized that 0-back and 2-back brain activity would be most similar, then flanker brain activity will be similar to these, and the resting state scan would not be similar to any of the tasks. In addition, it was hypothesized that the 2-back QPP will have greater correlation strength and frequency than the 0-back QPP. A cluster analysis was executed to obtain an average template for each of the conditions which was compared between each other to obtain an index of similarity. Future work should include different tasks that are dependent on other cognitive processes to see the effects on their QPPs.