Mangiamele LA et al. (2010), Characterization of the plasticity-related gene...

XB-ART-41716

Dev Neurobiol 2010 Oct 01;7012:813-25. doi: 10.1002/dneu.20817.

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Characterization of the plasticity-related gene, Arc, in the frog brain.

Mangiamele LA , Thomson CJ , Lebonville CL , Burmeister SS .

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In mammals, expression of the immediate early gene Arc/Arg3.1 in the brain is induced by exposure to novel environments, reception of sensory stimuli, and production of learned behaviors, suggesting a potentially important role in neural and behavioral plasticity. To date, Arc has only been characterized in a few species of mammals and birds, which limits our ability to understand its role in modifying behavior. To begin to address this gap, we identified Arc in two frog species, Xenopus tropicalis and Physalaemus pustulosus, and characterized its expression in the brain of P. pustulosus. We found that the predicted protein for frog Arc shared 60% sequence similarity with Arc in other vertebrates, and we observed high Arc expression in the forebrain, but not the midbrain or hindbrain, of female túngara frogs sacrificed at breeding ponds. We also examined the time-course of Arc induction in the medial pallium, the homologue of the mammalian hippocampus, in response to a recording of a P. pustulosus mating chorus and found that accumulation of Arc mRNA peaked 0.75 h following stimulus onset. We found that the mating chorus also induced Arc expression in the lateral and ventral pallia and the medial septum, but not in the striatum, hypothalamus, or auditory midbrain. Finally, we examined acoustically induced Arc expression in response to different types of mating calls and found that Arc expression levels in the pallium and septum did not vary with the biological relevance or acoustic complexity of the signal.

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Species referenced: Xenopus tropicalis
Genes referenced: arc arg2 myh3

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	Figure 1 Specificity of our Arc riboprobe. (A) Inverted darkfield images of transverse sections of the olfactory bulb in chorus stimulated animals hybridized with antisense or sense riboprobes (scale bar represents 500 lm). Excess tissue surrounding brain section was removed for clarity. (B) Northern blot of total liver and brain RNA hybridized with an Arc antisense riboprobe. Approximate positions of molecular size markers indicated (left). Images were adjusted for contrast.
	Figure 2 Photomicrographs of Nissl-stained tu´ngara frog brain tissue and corresponding schematic diagrams showing cytoarchitecture of areas in which Arc was sampled in the telencephalon (A), preoptic area (B), hypothalamus (C), and auditory midbrain (D). Boxes indicate sampling window. Bottom panel (E) shows the approximate level of transverse sections shown in A–D. Photomicrographs taken with a 53 objective. Scale bar represents 200 lm.
	Figure 4 Darkfield images showing Arc expression in the olfactory bulb (A), pallium (B), septum (C), preoptic area (D), hypothalamus (E), and torus semicircularis (F) of wild-caught females. Scale bar represents 100 lm.
	Figure 6 Photomicrographs of Arc mRNA expression in females exposed to a mating chorus (left column) compared to females not exposed to sound (right column) in the dorsal medial pallium (A and B), lateral pallium (C and D), ventral pallium (E and F), striatum (G and H), medial septum (I and J), preoptic area (K and L), dorsal hypothalamus (M and N), and laminar nucleus of the torus semicircularis (O and P). Images were adjusted for contrast. Scale bar represents 20 lm.