Impairment of Long-term Potentiation and Associative Memory in Mice That Overexpress Extracellular Superoxide Dismutase

• DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.20-20-07631.2000
• Publication Date: 2018-04-05T02:45:48Z
• Authors: Edda Thiels; Nathan N. Urban; Guillermo R. Gonz...; Beatriz I. Kanter...; German Barrionuevo; Charleen T. Chu; Tim D. Oury; Eric Klann
• Keywords: Male; Pain Threshold; Heterozygote; Memory Disorders; 0303 health sciences; Patch-Clamp Techniques; Long-Term Potentiation; Association Learning; Excitatory Postsynaptic Potentials; Mice, Transgenic; Fear; In Vitro Techniques; Hippocampus; Mice; 03 medical and health sciences; Avoidance Learning; Animals; Humans; Cues; Extracellular Space; Reactive Oxygen Species; Signal Transduction

Reactive oxygen species, including superoxide, generally are considered neurotoxic molecules whose effects can be alleviated by antioxidants. Different from this view, we show that scavenging of superoxide with an antioxidant enzyme is associated deficits in hippocampal long-term potentiation (LTP), a putative neural substrate memory, and hippocampal-mediated memory function. Using transgenic mice overexpress extracellular dismutase (EC-SOD), scavenger, found LTP was impaired area CA1 despite normal CA3. The impairment could reversed inhibition EC-SOD. In addition, EC-SOD exhibited fear conditioning to contextual cues exhibiting short-term the experience. These findings strongly suggest rather than being exclusively molecule, should also signaling molecule necessary for neuronal