Involvement of CX3CL1/CX3CR1 in Depression and Cognitive Impairment Induced by Chronic Unpredictable Stress and Relevant Underlying Mechanism.

Involvement of CX3CL1/CX3CR1 in Depression and Cognitive Impairment Induced by Chronic Unpredictable Stress and Relevant Underlying Mechanism. Behav Brain Res. 2019 Nov 22;:112371 Authors: Liu Y, Meng D, Sun L, Yang G, He Y, Zhang C Abstract Studies have suggested that heightened neuroinflammation contributes to the pathogenesis of depressive disorder. A major participant in neuroinflammation is microglia, and fractalkine signaling (which comprises the chemokine CX3CL1, mainly expressed by neurons, and its receptor CX3CR1, almost exclusively present on microglia in healthy brains) has been reported to critically regulate microglial activity. The aim of this study was to investigate whether CX3CR1 deficiency was associated with a different outcome following chronic unpredictable stress (CUS) and the possible mechanism. Wild-type (WT) and CX3CR1-deficient (CX3CR1-/-) mice were subjected to CUS for 3 weeks. CX3CR1-/- mice displayed a better performance through sucrose preference test, open field test and forced swim test, which demonstrated that CX3CR1 deficiency alleviated depressive-like disturbances, such as anhedonia, anxiety or hopelessness. Nevertheless, CX3CR1-/- mice also showed less severe cognitive impairment from the results of Morris Water Maze and Novel object recognition. Long-term potentiation was recorded to test the synaptic plasticity and its result was consistent with that of cognitive ability tests. Both results of r...
Source: Behavioural Brain Research - Category: Neurology Authors: Tags: Behav Brain Res Source Type: research