Center for Environmental Risk Research, National Institute for Environmental Studies, 16-2 Onogawa, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, 305-8506, Japan.
J Appl Toxicol. 2012 Apr;32(4):300-4. doi: 10.1002/jat.1693. Epub 2011 May 24.
The present study was designed to investigate the acute effect of a single administration of toluene (300 mg kg(-1), i.p.) on memory retention in the hippocampus-dependent novel object recognition test and N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor subunit expression in the hippocampus of C3H/HeN female mice using real-time RT-PCR. We performed a novel object recognition test including a habituation phase, training phase and test phase in each mouse. Twenty-four hours after the training phase, to determine the effect of acute toluene administration on memory retention, half of the mice (n=10) were injected with toluene 60 min before the test phase. Toluene-injected mice did not prefer novel objects and showed poor discrimination between novel and familiar objects and decreased expression of NMDA receptor subunit NR2B mRNA in the hippocampus. This is the first study to show that acute toluene injection impairs hippocampus-dependent nonspatial memory retention accompanied by selective modulation of NMDA receptor subunit expression.
本研究旨在通过实时 RT-PCR 技术，研究单次腹腔注射甲苯（300mg/kg）对 C3H/HeN 雌性小鼠海马依赖性新物体识别试验中记忆保留的急性影响，以及对海马 N-甲基-D-天冬氨酸（NMDA）受体亚单位表达的影响。我们在每只小鼠中进行了新物体识别测试，包括适应阶段、训练阶段和测试阶段。在训练阶段 24 小时后，为了确定急性甲苯给药对记忆保留的影响，一半的小鼠（n=10）在测试阶段前 60 分钟注射甲苯。甲苯注射的小鼠不喜欢新物体，并且在新物体和熟悉物体之间的区分能力较差，并且海马 NMDA 受体亚单位 NR2B mRNA 的表达降低。这是第一项表明急性甲苯注射损害海马依赖性非空间记忆保留的研究，同时伴有 NMDA 受体亚单位表达的选择性调节。
