Altered inflammatory responsiveness in serotonin transporter mutant rats

Journal of Neuroinflammation

Raffaella Molteni¹  Marco A Riva³  Giorgio Racagni³  Claudia Zecchillo¹  Francesca Calabrese¹  Judith R Homberg²  Flavia Macchi⁴ 

[1] Dipartimento di Scienze Farmacologiche e Biomolecolari, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy;Donders Institute for Brain Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre, Nijmegen, The Netherlands;Center of Excellence on Neurodegenerative Diseases, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy;Department of Clinical and Molecular Biomedicine, Section of Pharmacology and Biochemistry, University of Catania, Catania, Italy

关键词: Animal model;    Microglia;    Cytokines;    Lipopolysaccharide (LPS);    Inflammation;   

Others  :  1152122
DOI  :  10.1186/1742-2094-10-116

 received in 2013-07-22, accepted in 2013-09-09,  发布年份 2013

【 摘 要 】

Background

Growing evidence suggests that alterations of the inflammatory/immune system contribute to the pathogenesis of depression. Indeed, depressed patients exhibit increased levels of inflammatory markers in both the periphery and the brain, and high comorbidity exists between major depression and diseases associated with inflammatory alterations. In order to characterize the link between depression and inflammation, we aimed to investigate whether an altered inflammatory system is present in a genetic model of vulnerability for depression, namely rats with partial or total deletion of the serotonin transporter (SERT) gene.

Methods

Wild-type, heterozygous and homozygous SERT rats were analyzed under basal condition or following a challenge with an acute injection of lipopolysaccharide (LPS) and killed 24 h or 5 days later.

Results

We found that SERT mutant rats show altered cytokine expression in the dorsal and ventral hippocampus at basal conditions, and they also display an exacerbated cytokine response to the LPS challenge. Moreover, mutant rats exhibit differences in the expression of markers for microglia activation.

Conclusion

Based on these data, we suggest that basal or functional alterations of immune/inflammatory systems might contribute to the phenotype of SERT rats and to their heightened susceptibility to depressive-like behavior.

【 授权许可】

   
2013 Macchi et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

【 图 表 】

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