The physiological response to excessively strong aversive stimuli – the stress response – is relatively maladaptive and leads to various psychopathologies such as anxiety disorders only in a minority of individuals. Our lab has previously shown that severe acute restraint stress heightens anxiety-like behaviour in wild-type but not in the extracellular serine protease, neuropsin, deficient mice. Dissecting molecular changes underlying genotypic differences, our microarray and qRT-PCR approaches revealed that the stress-induced upregulation of glucocorticoid receptor (GR) co-chaperone, Fkbp5, expression in the amygdala is significantly attenuated in neuropsin-/- mice compared to the wild-type mice and attenuated expression can be restored by bilateral intraamygdala injection of recombinant neuropsin. Further, blocking neuropsin cleavage of EphB2 with anti-EphB2 antibody suppressed only neuropsin-mediated but not corticosterone-driven upregulation of Fkbp5 expression in primary amygdala cultures unraveling novel neuropsin-dependent mechanism acting in synergy with the well characterized corticosterone pathway to mediate the robust stress-effect on Fkbp5 expression. Importantly, wild-type mice lacking amygdala specific Fkbp5 exhibit stress protective phenotype in unconditioned anxiety tests. Therefore, this study characterizes and concludes an indispensable role of amygdalar Fkbp5 in stressful episodes developing into anxiety disorders.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:564208 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Patel, Satyam Gunvantbhai |
| Contributors | Pawlak, Robert |
| Publisher | University of Leicester |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/2381/27663 |
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