Menami Gordon
Pronouns: she/her
Research Mentor(s): Marcel Elkouri
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Neuroscience Graduate Program / Medicine
Program:
Authors: Menami Gordon, Marcel Elkouri, Aysia Kinnaird, Mercedes Morin, Ilanis Rodriguez-Torres, Francesca Czesak, Jonathan Morrow
Session: Session 6: 3:40 pm – 4:30 pm
Poster: 22
Abstract
Individuals exhibit differing levels of susceptibility to psychiatric disorders due to natural variations in neural activity, receptor expression, and circuit strength. Additionally, sleep abnormalities put individuals at higher risk for developing psychiatric disorders due to their effects on gene expression in the brain. Both sleep abnormalities and psychiatric disorders hinder emotional memory consolidation, leading to decreased emotional welfare. These negative effects significantly impact the wellbeing of affected individuals, motivating the search for effective treatments. Through animal trials with contextual fear conditioning (CFC), we seek to elucidate the role of sleep and histone function in emotional memory consolidation. Using a Pavlovian conditioned approach (PCA), we sorted Sprague Dawley rats into sign-trackers (STs), who tend to be cue-driven, and goal-trackers (GTs), who tend to be motivated by the reward stimulus. Through CFC, we compared STs and GTs ability to consolidate emotional memories and observed the effects of sodium butyrate and sleep deprivation on freezing time (FT), a measure of the degree to which the rats process and store emotional memories. Previously, STs have been shown to exhibit deficiencies in memory consolidation relative to GTs. This gives us reason to believe that there may be a biological overlap between the causes of memory impairment in sleep deprivation and the natural behavior of STs. We hypothesize that sodium butyrate will increase freezing time for STs and GTs and reduce the memory consolidation disparities between STs and GTs by increasing acetylation. Additionally, we hypothesize that sleep deprivation will decrease freezing time for all animals due to decreased acetylation of neuronal DNA. Finally, we predict that sodium butyrate will aid in restoring the impacts of sleep deprivation for all animals.
