Gene expression patterns in the hippocampus and amygdala of endogenous depression and chronic stress models

Description 

The etiology of depression is still poorly understood, but two major causative hypotheses have been put forth: the monoamine deficiency and the stress hypotheses of depression. We evaluate these hypotheses using animal models of endogenous depression and chronic stress. The endogenously depressed rat and its control strain were developed by bidirectional selective breeding from the Wistar–Kyoto (WKY) rat, an accepted model of major depressive disorder (MDD). The WKY More Immobile (WMI) substrain shows high immobility/ despair-like behavior in the forced swim test (FST), while the control substrain, WKY Less Immobile (WLI), shows no depressive behavior in the FST. Chronic stress responses were investigated by using Brown Norway, Fischer 344, Lewis and WKY, genetically and behaviorally distinct strains of rats. Animals were either not stressed or exposed to chronic restraint stress. Genome-wide microarray analyses using Rat Genome 230 2.0 GeneChip arrays (Affymetrix) were performed on individual hippocampi and amygdalae from the endogenous depression and the chronic stress models. For further details, see Andrus et al., 2010.

Data

Data, design and statistics

Chronic Stress: chronicstress.zip 33 Mb
Depression: depression.zip 77 Mb

Publications 

Andrus BM, Blizinsky K, Vedell PT, Dennis K, Shukla PK, Schaffer DJ, Radulovic J, Churchill GA, Redei EE
Mol Psychiatry. 2012 Jan;17(1):49-61 [ Full Text ].     PMCID: PMC3117129