Meeting Abstract
A period of environmental disturbances can influence an individual’s brain and behavior, even after the end of that experience. Zebrafish (Danio rerio) have distinct behavioral, physiological, and neuronal responses to stressors. We were interested in how chronic stress is mitigated in the zebrafish brain, further, we hypothesized that chronic stress would affect learning and memory-associated gene expression. To address this question, we chronically stressed male and female adult zebrafish with unpredictable environmental changes, and subsequently compared their locomotor behavior to unstressed zebrafish. In addition to the behavior approach, we looked at candidate stress- and memory- associated gene expression in the whole brain. After chronic stress exposure, both males and females exhibited a decrease in hsd11b2 expression, which could be from translation to protein to deactivate cortisol. In chronically stressed vs unstressed females, there was a higher ache expression, which is found to impair memory in mammal and other teleost studies. However, the difference was not seen in males. Zebrafish in all groups spent most of the time at the bottom half of the novel tank, and in stressed versus unstressed males, there was less total swimming distance. While chronic stress experience altered gene expression in the whole brain, and telencephalon-specific studies will better elucidate potential altered learning and memory from this experience.
