NeuroStudies: A Model of an Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Studies Minor.

With nationwide demand for neuroscience programs increasing, faculty and administrators at a public institution with a liberal arts curriculum sought to develop a distinctive program building on existing strengths that would best fit our primarily undergraduate population. The creation of an interdisciplinary Neuroscience Studies minor was the result of collaborations with university stakeholders. Students taking Longwood University's Neuroscience Studies minor are trained to incorporate neuroscience into their areas of interest. Students take three core courses in neuroscience, including an introductory course, laboratory course, and interdisciplinary capstone experience. Additionally, students select three neuroscience-related courses from their major discipline. To gain broad support, the program was intentionally designed to support the university's mission, academic strategic plan, and several key university initiatives. Importantly for our smaller institution, the minor was implemented using existing university faculty, university resources, and a single hire. Since starting in 2015, the minor has quickly become the third largest on campus with increasing popularity among honors students. Program graduates have applied their training to careers paths as neuroscience Ph.D. candidates, master's degrees in a range of fields such as counseling, speech pathology, nursing, education, and neuropsychology, and others have benefited upon entering the workforce. Longwood's success developing an interdisciplinary Neuroscience Studies minor represents a blueprint for smaller institutions with limited resources, to provide students with an opportunity to learn about neuroscience and prepare for the future job market.

Using Action-Mapping to Design a Non-Majors Neuroeconomics Course to Teach First-Year Collegiate Skills.

With its ability to address questions about how decisions are made and why, neuroeconomics is an excellent topic of study for college students at a variety of levels. In this paper we detail a neuroeconomics course specifically modified for undecided First-year students. One particularly daunting challenge was defining clear outcomes and delivering instruction at an appropriate level. We used Action-Mapping to achieve the course objectives of teaching collegiate skills applicable to any path of study or career while also delivering content suitable for credits in both a social science and natural science.

The mother as hunter: significant reduction in foraging costs through enhancements of predation in maternal rats.

In previous laboratory investigations, we have identified enhanced cognition and reduced stress in parous rats, which are likely adaptations in mothers needing to efficiently exploit resources to maintain, protect and provision their immature offspring. Here, in a series of seven behavioral tests on rats, we examined a natural interface between cognition and resource gathering: predation. Experiment 1 compared predatory behavior (toward crickets) in age-matched nulliparous mothers (NULLs) and postpartum lactating mothers (LACTs), revealing a highly significant enhancement of predation in LACT females (mean = -65s in LACTs, vs. -270s in NULLs). Experiment 2 examined the possibility that LACTs, given their increased metabolic rate, were hungrier, and thus more motivated to hunt; doubling the length of time of food deprivation in NULLs did not decrease their predatory latencies. Experiments 3-5, which examined sensory regulation of the effect, indicated that olfaction (anosmia), audition (blockade with white noise), and somatosensation (trimming the vibrissae) appear to play little role in the behavioral enhancement observed in the LACTs; Experiment 6 examined the possibility that visual augmentations may facilitate the improvements in predation; testing LACTs in a 0-lux environment eliminated the behavioral advantage (increasing their latencies from -65s to -212s), which suggests that temporary augmentation to the visual system may be important, and with hormone-neural alterations therein a likely candidate for further study. In contrast, testing NULLS in the 0-lux environment had the opposite effect, reducing their latency to catch the cricket (from -270s to -200s). Finally, Experiment 7 examined the development of predatory behavior in Early-pregnant (PREG), Mid-PREG, and Late-PREG females. Here, we observed a significant enhancement of predation in Mid-PREG and Late-PREG females--at a time when maternity-associated bodily changes would be expected to diminish predation ability--relative to NULLs. Therefore, as with the increasing reports of enhancements to the maternal brain, it is apparent that meaningful behavioral adaptations occur that likewise promote the survival of the mother and her infants at a crucial stage of their lives.

Reproductive experience facilitates recovery from kainic acid-induced neural insult in female Long-Evans rats.

The hormones of pregnancy and lactation (e.g., estrogen, progesterone, and oxytocin) have been shown to modulate learning, memory, and the restructuring of brain areas not traditionally associated with maternal behavior. Given the impact of reproductive experience on plasticity of brain areas such as the hippocampus, kainic acid (KA) was used in the current study to induce hippocampal-specific neurotoxic insult in adult multiparous and virgin Long-Evans rats. In Experiment I, Fluoro-Jade B, an indicant of degenerating cells, revealed significant neuronal damage in KA-treated hippocampi at 16 h post-injection in both maternal and virgin rats. In Experiment II, maternal and virgin rats were assessed in spatial and novel object preference tasks to determine the effects of KA on subsequent behavioral and cognitive responses. Twenty-four hours post injection, saline maternal animals exhibited superior memory in a spatial task. Further, maternal saline-injected rats were more similar to maternal KA-injected rats than both the virgin groups. Forty-eight hours following the KA or saline injection, compared to virgins, maternal animals demonstrated enhanced memory in the novel object memory test, regardless of type of injection. Further, neurobiological assessments in Experiment II indicated that virgin KA exposed rats had significantly more glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP)-immunoreactivity in the hippocampus, suggesting that they were in an earlier stage of neural recovery compared to maternal animals or, alternatively, may have exhibited more trauma than maternal animals. Together, these data suggest that the previously reported plasticity of the maternal brain may facilitate neural and behavioral recovery from neural insults.

Reproductive experience may positively adjust the trajectory of senescence.

Although aging is inexorable, aging well is not. From the perspective of research in rats and complementary models, reproductive experience has significant effects; indeed, benefits, which include better-than-average cognitive skills, a slowing of the slope of decline, and a healthier brain and/or nervous system well later into life. Work from our lab and others has suggested that the events of pregnancy and parturition, collectively referred to as reproductive experience-an amalgam of hormone exposure, sensory stimulation, and offspring behavioral experience and interaction-may summate to flatten the degree of decline normally associated with aging. Mimicking the effects of an enriched environment, reproductive experience has been shown to: enhance/protect cognition and decrease anxiety well out to two-plus years; result in fewer hippocampal deposits of the Alzheimer's disease herald, amyloid precursor protein (APP); and, in general, lead to a healthier biology. Based on a suite of recent work in organisms as diverse as nematodes, flies, and mammals, the ubiquitous hormone insulin and its large family of related substances and receptors may play a major role in mediating some of the effects of RE on the parameters of aging studied thus far. We will discuss the current set of data that suggest mechanisms for successful biological and neurobiological aging, and the implications for understanding aging and senescence in their broadest terms.

Fatherhood alters behavioural and neural responsiveness in a spatial task.

The hormones and experiences of pregnancy, parturition and lactation have been shown to dramatically remodel the female rat's hippocampus, potentially enhancing behaviours critical for meeting the increased demands of motherhood. Previous work in our laboratory has also suggested that pup exposure, apart from pregnancy and lactation, constitutes an important influence on ancillary maternal behaviour (e.g. foraging behaviour). In the present study, we press the parental model further by examining the effect of pup exposure on the hippocampus of males from a biparental mouse species, the California mice (Peromyscus californicus). Males were either Fathers (i.e. first-time fathers housed with a female from mating until 7 days after parturition), pup-exposed virgins (PEV; i.e. sexually naïve males briefly exposed to pups daily for 7 days) or Virgins (i.e. never exposed to females or pups). A dry-land maze (DLM), as used for assessing spatial learning, was employed to determine the foraging abilities of the males. The results indicated that, on the most challenging day of testing (i.e. acquisition day), California mouse Fathers demonstrated superior memory for the task compared to PEVs and Virgins. In addition to the behavioural data, significantly more fos-immunoreactivity was observed in the CA1, CA3 and dentate gyrus regions of the hippocampi of Fathers than PEVs or Virgins in response to the probe trial. Additionally, a trend for altered performance on the DLM was observed in the PEVs on the last day of testing, which was accompanied by the highest levels of nestin-immunoreactivity, an indicant of neuroplasticity, of the three groups. In summary, these data suggest that, in accordance with previous observations of maternal rats, the paternal brain is similarly influenced by parental experience, as demonstrated by accompanying modifications to relevant neurobiological and behavioural responses.

Limb chondrogenesis of the seepage salamander, Desmognathus aeneus (amphibia: plethodontidae).

Salamanders are infrequently mentioned in analyses of tetrapod limb formation, as their development varies considerably from that of amniotes. However, urodeles provide an opportunity to study how limb ontogeny varies with major differences in life history. Here we assess limb development in Desmognathus aeneus, a direct-developing salamander, and compare it to patterns seen in salamanders with larval stages (e.g., Ambystoma mexicanum). Both modes of development result in a limb that is morphologically indistinct from an amniote limb. Developmental series of A. mexicanum and D. aeneus were investigated using Type II collagen immunochemistry, Alcian Blue staining, and whole-mount TUNEL staining. In A. mexicanum, as each digit bud extends from the limb palette Type II collagen and proteoglycan secretion occur almost simultaneously with mesenchyme condensation. Conversely, collagen and proteoglycan secretion in digits of D. aeneus occur only after the formation of an amniote-like paddle. Within each species, Type II collagen expression patterns resemble those of proteoglycans. In both, distal structures form before more proximal structures. This observation is contrary to the proximodistal developmental pattern of other tetrapods and may be unique to urodeles. In support of previous findings, no cell death was observed during limb development in A. mexicanum. However, apoptotic cells that may play a role in digit ontogeny occur in the limbs of D. aeneus, thereby suggesting that programmed cell death has evolved as a developmental mechanism at least twice in tetrapod limb evolution.

How trematodes cause limb deformities in amphibians.

We used trematode cyst infestation to induce limb deformities in two species of frogs of the genus Rana and compared them to deformities induced by surgical limb bud rotations. The specific deformities produced by both treatments closely resemble those of wild-caught deformed amphibians and are consistent with a known developmental response to disruption of the spatial organization of cells in developing limb buds. Histological analysis showed that trematode cysts cause massive disruption and abnormal cellular growth involving the limb buds of infected individuals. Our results indicate that trematode cyst infestation causes deformities in frogs by perturbation of the positional relationships of cells in developing limb buds. The crippling effects of cyst-infection on frogs may reflect complex co-evolutionary interactions among trematodes, frogs, and other hosts in the trematode's life cycle.