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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

stress, exercise, long-term potentiation in mouse hippocampi

College

Life Sciences

Department

Physiology and Developmental Biology

Abstract

The hippocampus is an area of the brain that mediates learning and memory by changing the properties of synapses between its neurons. This ability of synapses to change is known as synaptic plasticity. Long-term potentiation (LTP), a long-lasting increase in signal transmission between two neurons, is one of several phenomena underlying synaptic plasticity and is the cellular correlate of memory and learning. Several studies of LTP in mice show that there is a marked impairment of LTP in hippocampal slices taken from rodents exposed to stress. Their data suggests that stress may lead to deficits in learning and memory. In fact, behavioral studies in mice show a significant decrease in performance on memory tasks. Although stress has been shown to be detrimental to our ability to acquire and store new information, there has been increasing evidence that exercise has profound benefits for learning and memory. Exercise enhances LTP in the hippocampus and also improves results on memory tasks. These results suggest that exercise might be able to serve as a defense against the effects of stress on learning and memory. Despite this possibility, there has yet to be a study incorporating both stress and exercise in hippocampal mediated learning and memory. For this reason, we conducted an experiment to investigate this possibility.

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