| 研究実績の概要 |
Whereas hibernation is common in rodents and other animals, there are only a very few cases of suspected hibernation or states similar to hibernation in humans. Induced hibernation, also known as suspended animation, is the slowing or stopping of life processes without termination by cooling the body down. This technology has great potential for long distance space travel and medicine. Induced hypothermia has been used for open-heart surgeries and other clinical procedures, but the risk for brain functions is largely unknown. In this research, we plan to elucidate the effects of genetically or pharmacologically induced hypothermia on the consolidation of fear or spatial memories.
We have established chemogenetic and pharmacologic methods to induce hypothermia in mice. For the chemogenetic method, we have used an innovative genetically engineered system to induce hypothermia by activating GABAergic neurons in the median preoptic area of the hypothalamus. For the pharmacologic method, we used an adenosine A2A receptor agonist which strongly decreases body temperature. By using these methods, we observed that hypothermia may be beneficial for the suppression of traumatic memories.
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| 今後の研究の推進方策 |
While our current findings may reveal that hypothermia is beneficial to suppress memories of traumatic events, hypothermia may be a risk for hippocampus-dependent memories, for example spatial memory that is important for navigation. Therefore, we aim to investigate the behavior of mice after chemogenetically induced hypothermia in spatial memory paradigms, for example, Morris water navigation task and radial arm maze.
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