Gibbs RB, Fitz NF, Johnson DA (2005) Cholinergic lesions produce selective effects on cognitive performance in rats. Neuroscience 2005 Abstracts 881.1. Society for Neuroscience, Washington, DC.
Summary: Cholinergic projections from the basal forebrain play an important role in cognitive processes; however, the degree to which damage to specific projections contributes to impairment within specific cognitive domains is unclear. In the present study, cholinergic projections to the hippocampus and/or frontal cortex of young adult, ovariectomized Sprague-Dawley rats were selectively destroyed by injecting 192 IgG-saporin (SAP) into the medial septum (MS), the nucleus basalis magnocellularis (NBM), or both the MS and NBM (MSNBM). Controls received injections of sterile saline. Animals were then tested for learning and memory impairments using a series of tasks, including a delayed matching-to-position (DMP) T-maze task, an operant configural association (CA) negative patterning task, and a 12-arm radial maze (RAM) task, administered in that order. Results reveal different effects of the lesions on the different tasks. For example, SAP lesions of the MS, as well as combined lesions of MS and NBM significantly impaired acquisition the DMP task; however, once animals had reached criterion, cholinergic lesions did not alter decrements in performance produced by increasing the intertrial delay. In contrast, SAP lesions of the MS had no significant effect on acquisition of the CA task, although combined lesions of MS and NBM produced a trend toward impairment on the CA task among animals with the most severe cholinergic depletion. Likewise, combined lesions significantly impaired acquisition of the RAM task. In general, combined lesions produced greater impairments than lesions of either the MS or NBM alone. Significant correlations between acquisition of the DMP and RAM tasks and ChAT activity in the hippocampus, frontal cortex, and occipital cortex, were also detected. These data demonstrate that removal of cholinergic projections to the hippocampus and frontal cortex produce cognitive impairments that are lesion specific as well as task dependent.
Related Products: 192-IgG-SAP (Cat. #IT-01)