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Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience

Using The Suprachiasmatic Nucleus As A Model System To Assess Tolerance And Withdrawal To Alcohol, Jonathan Houghton Lindsay Aug 2017

Using The Suprachiasmatic Nucleus As A Model System To Assess Tolerance And Withdrawal To Alcohol, Jonathan Houghton Lindsay

Doctoral Dissertations

Alcohol abuse induces many disorders including depression, metabolic syndrome, and sleep disturbances. The strong link between alcohol abuse and sleep problems, along with the close connection between sleep and circadian rhythms, led us to investigate ethanol’s effects on the circadian clock. Previous work has shown that acute ethanol blocks photic phase shifts in vivo and glutamatergic phase shifts in vitro. However, neural systems become tolerant to ethanol across different timeframes. Despite both ethanol tolerance and ethanol withdrawal syndrome being listed as criteria for developing alcohol use disorders, little is known about how ethanol tolerance and withdrawal induced hyperexcitability develop and …


Behavioral, Neurobiological, And Genetic Analysis Of The Circadian Mutant Duper, Emily Nicole Corbett Manoogian Nov 2015

Behavioral, Neurobiological, And Genetic Analysis Of The Circadian Mutant Duper, Emily Nicole Corbett Manoogian

Doctoral Dissertations

The recently discovered circadian mutant hamster duper has a short period of ~23 hours and exhibits exaggerated phase shifts in response to a 15-min light pulse. To increase the understanding of the duper mutation, I performed behavioral, neurobiological, and genetic experiments. Behavioral studies using photic and non-photic stimuli found that large phase shifts exhibited by duper hamsters are specific to photic cues, but not to phase. Additionally, 2/3 of duper hamsters, but no WTs, displayed transient ultradian wheel-running patterns when transferred from light to dark at CT 18. This suggests that the mutation may weaken coupling among components of the …