One male and one female per litter (8-9 per treatment group) were tested. Using an incremental repeated acquisition (IRA) task to assess learning ability, ACR-exposed Fischer 344 rats exhibited altered performance by 4 months of age. From approximately 1-8 months of age (through similar to PND 240), over 52 testing sessions, a significant treatment effect was found on percent task completed (PTC), with Tukey’s post-hoc test (P<0.05) indicating a significantly lower FTC for the 5.0 mg/kg/day group compared to controls. While there was no treatment effect on accuracy (P=0.53), a significant decrease in response
rate was seen at 5.0 mg/kg/day, suggesting that the noted decrease in PTC was due to a decrease in rate of responding, not to an effect
on accuracy of task solution. Previous findings in these same animals performing a progressive ratio task for the assessment of motivation, Selleckchem P5091 as well as a range of tests of motoric function, suggest that this decreased response rate could be due to subtle motoric effects, or possibly due to decreases in psychomotor speed, but is most likely due to motivational effects. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.”
“There have been no long-term systematic analyses of the molecular epidemiology of human parvovirus B19 (B19V). We investigated the variations of nucleotide sequences of B19V strains collected in Sapporo, Japan, from 1980 to 2008. In that period, six outbreaks of erythema infectiosum occurred Smad inhibitor regularly at 5-year intervals. The B19V strains collected successively, regardless of the outbreak, were analyzed for nucleotide variation in the subgenomic NS1-VP1u junction. The isolated strains can be classified into 10 subgroups. Two patterns of change of endemic strains were observed. One was a dynamic replacement
of strains that occurred almost every 10 years, and the other was a gradual change consisting of an accumulation of point mutations.”
“3-nitropropionic acid (3-NPA) is a naturally occurring neurotoxin produced by legumes of the genus Astragalus and Arthrium fungi. Acute exposure to 3-NPA results in striatal astrocytic death and variety of behavior dysfunction in rats. Oxidative HSP90 stress has been reported to play an important role in 3-NPA-induced neurotoxicity. Trolox is a potent free radical chain breaking antioxidant which has been shown to restore structure and function of the nervous system following oxidative stress. This rapid and efficient antioxidant property of trolox was attributed to its enhanced water solubility as compared with alpha-tocopherol. This investigation was aimed to study the effect of trolox against 3-NPA-induced neurotoxicity in female Wistar rats. The animals received trolox (0, 40 mg, 80 mg and 160 mg/kg, orally) daily for 7 days. 3-NPA (25 mg/kg, i.p.) was administered daily 30 min after trolox for the same duration. One additional group of rats served as control (vehicle only).