Dynamic expression changes in the transcriptome of the prefrontal cortex after repeated exposure to cocaine in mice

In the current study, we performed transcriptome profiling of the mouse PFC to determine the dynamic changes in the Prefrontal cortex (PFC)after repeated cocaine treatment. In the current study, we observed dynamic changes in the transcriptome profiling of the PFC of repeated-cocaine treated mice, and found that distinct pathways were involved in the acute, sub-acute, and chronic stages of cocaine withdrawal. The main findings of our results include: 1) energy metabolism and protein metabolism pathways showed gradual or fluctuant decrease after cocaine withdrawal; 2) ERK pathway showed persistent changes after cocaine withdrawal; 3) plasticity related pathways, such as long-term potentiation, the regulation of the actin cytoskeleton, and the axon guidance pathway, showed a fluctuant increase after cocaine withdrawal. Our results suggest that maladaptive neural plasticity associated with psychostimulant dependence may be an ongoing degenerative process with dynamic changes in the gene network at different stages of withdrawal. Overall design: The bilateral PFC was excised from each animal at either 2 h, 24 h, or 7 days after the final injection of cocaine. To account for inter-animal variations, we obtained 2 biological replicates for each treatment group, with each replicate representing the PFCs pooled from 5 animals. Pair-end 75-nt sequencing was performed using the Illumina HiSeq2000.

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Li M, Xu P, Xu Y, Teng H, Tian W, Du Q, Zhao M