Sarter M, Turchi J (2000) Effects of intra-basalis infusion of d-cycloserine upon sustained attention performance in rats. Neuroscience 2000 Abstracts 837.10. Society for Neuroscience, New Orleans, LA.
Summary: As basal forebrain NMDA receptor modulation has been hypothesized to play a significant role in tasks taxing attentional processes (Turchi & Sarter 1999), positive NMDA receptor modulation via the glycine site might attenuate the substantive impairments of sustained attentional processing observed following specific lesions of corticopetal cholinergic neurons (McGaughy, Kaiser & Sarter, 1996). Rats were trained in a sustained attention task (McGaughy & Sarter 1995) requiring animals to discriminate between unpredictably occurring visual signals of varying lengths (25, 50, 500 msec) and non-signal events. Upon attaining stable performance, chronic guide cannula were implanted bilaterally for the infusion of an NMDA receptor glycine site ligand into the SI/NB; one group of these animals also received bilateral infusions of 192 IgG-saporin (0.21μg/μl; 0.5 μl/hemisphere), while the other group received infusions (0.5 μl/hemisphere) of the vehicle for the immunotoxin. The effects of administrations of D-cycloserine (DCS: 0.5 & 5 μg in 0.5 μl/hemisphere) were tested in these two groups of animals (lesioned and sham-lesioned). Administration of the higher dose of DCS partly attenuated the lesion-induced decrease in hits in the sustained attention paradigm. This finding suggests that impairments of sustained attention incurred by damage to the basal forebrain cholinergic system may be effectively ameliorated by positive NMDA receptor modulation via the partial agonism of the glycine site.
Related Products: 192-IgG-SAP (Cat. #IT-01)