Identifier

114

Date

2018

Document Type

Honors Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Major

Psychology

Concentration

Behavioral Neuroscience

Committee Member

Helen Sable

Committee Member

Deranda Lester

Abstract

Diet and exercise are known to impact both cognition and neurobiology. This study used 28 male Long-Evans rats to investigate the effects that two different diet conditions and two different exercise conditions had on the expression of activity-regulated cytoskeletal protein (ARC) in the hippocampus following 5.25 months of operant working memory testing. The two diets consisted of the Western Diet (WD) and the Daniel Fast (DF) diet while the exercise conditions consisted of an exercise group (E) and a sedentary group (S). Automated operant conditioning boxes were used to examine working memory performance on a delayed spatial alternation task that began when the rats were 200 days old. The best working memory performance occurred in the DF-E group, particularly during the intermediate testing sessions and at longer working memory delays. There were no differences in working memory performance during the latter testing sessions. After operant testing, animals were euthanized, and the hippocampus was quickly removed to later be used for Western blot. Based on the working memory performance, it was hypothesized that the expression of ARC in the DF-E rats would be the highest. Analysis of the data confirmed that sedentary rats receiving the DF diet had significantly higher expression of ARC than sedentary rats on the WD. In addition, exercise was only able to increase ARC expression in the lower quality diet, but not in the rats that were given the higher quality DF diet. Overall, these results indicate that both diet and exercise can influence the levels of ARC in the hippocampus.

Comments

Undergraduate Honor's Thesis

Library Comment

Honors thesis originally submitted to the Local University of Memphis Honor’s Thesis Repository.

Notes

Data is provided by the student.

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