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Environmental enrichment (EE) is widely used to study the effects of external factors on brain development, function and health in rodent models, but very little is known of the effects of EE on the brain in a large animal model such as the pig. Twenty-four young pigs (aged 5 weeks at start of study, 1:1 male: female ratio) were housed in environmentally enriched (EE) pens and provided with additional enrichment stimulation (a bag filled with straw) once daily. Litter, weight and sex matched controls n= (24) were housed in barren (B) conditions. Behaviour was recorded on alternate days from study day 10. After 21 days, RNA-sequencing of the frontal cortex of male piglets culled one hour after the enrichment stimulation, but not those at 4 h after stimulation, showed upregulation of genes involved in neuronal activity and synaptic plasticity in the EE compared to the B condition. This result is mirrored in the behavioural response to the stimulation which showed a peak in activity around the 1 h time-point. By contrast, EE piglets displayed a signature consistent with a relative decrease in microglial activity compared to those in the B condition. These results confirm those from rodents, suggesting that EE may also confer neuronal health benefits in large mammal models, through a potential relative reduction in neuroinflammatory process and increase in neuroprotection driven by an enrichment-induced increase in behavioural activity.
Pubmed ID: 29778628
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BioLayout Express3D is a powerful new tool for the visualization and analysis of networks derived from biological systems. Network-based approaches are becoming increasing popular for the analysis of ''omics and other high dimensional data. Networks can be produced from a wide variety of biological relationships, such as interactions between individuals, disease transmission, sequence similarity, metabolic pathways, protein interactions, pathways, regulatory cascades, gene expression, etc. BioLayout Express3D has been specifically designed for visualization, clustering and analysis of large network graphs in two- and three-dimensional space derived primarily, but not exclusively, from biological data. Sponsors: This resource is supported by BBSRC (BB / F003722 / 1) and the Wellcome Trust (GR077040RP). Keywords: Biology, Tool, Software, visualization, Analysis, Network, Biological, System, Dimentional, Data, Disease, Transmission, Sequence, Metabolic, Pathway, Protein, Interaction, Gene, Expression, Clustering, Analysis,
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