IBRO-In

Europe Short Stay Grants Program final report from Ashley Novais

Final report
Stress response mechanism is evolutionary adapted in animals. However when
exposure to stress is uncontrollable it can lead to a maladaptive response causing stress-
related disorders, such as major depression and anxiety (Mesquita et al. 2009). Efforts
have been made to understand the brain circuitry involved in stress. The corticolimbic
circuit is the major brain circuit involved in the stress response, but it is not entirely
well understood how the deregulation of this circuit affects the entire brain. In order to
understand this, we have taken advantage of a Bruker PharmaScan 11.7T for rodents
available at Neurospin, Saclay and have performed MRI in stressed and control male rat
brains. On going is the post processing of functional MRI and in vivo diffusion MRI
neuro-images.
During the time spent at Neurospin, Saclay we have performed 21 days of chronic
unpredictable stress protocol (CUS) to 20 male Wistar rats (Cerqueira et al. 2007) and
collected blood for posterior corticosterone quantification to confirm high levels in
chronic stress animals (Gray et al. 2013). We have characterized anxiety, learned
helplessness and short-term memory in rats exposed to CUS and compared their
performance to control animals. We used the elevated plus maze for the evaluation of
anxiety; we used the forced swim test for the evaluation of learned helplessness
dimension and we used the novel object recognition test for the evaluation of short-term
memory. Not only this behavior characterization was essential for correlation with our
future MRI data but also to implement behavior testing at Neurospin, Saclay.
During this collaboration I was under the supervision of Sebastien Meriaux (figure 1), he
has integrated me in his multi disciplinary team, from which I have learned MRI skills.

Fig. 1 Sebastien Meriaux standing next to IBRO-PERC short-term grant recipient Ashley Novais,
at Neurospin, Saclay in France.

References
Cerqueira JJ, Mailliet F, Almeida OF, Jay TM, Sousa N. 2007. The prefrontal cortex as a key target
of the maladaptive response to stress. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of
the Society for Neuroscience 27: 2781-2787.
Gray JD, Milner TA, McEwen BS. 2013. Dynamic plasticity: the role of glucocorticoids, brain-
derived neurotrophic factor and other trophic factors. Neuroscience 239: 214-227.
Mesquita AR, Wegerich Y, Patchev AV, Oliveira M, Leao P, Sousa N, Almeida OF. 2009.
Glucocorticoids and neuro- and behavioural development. Seminars in fetal & neonatal
medicine 14: 130-135.

IBRO-In Europe Short Stay Grants Program final report from Ashley Novais