Table 3.

Fragmented maternal care alters the abundance of transcripts encoding opioid peptides, opioid receptors, and β-arrestin2 in the spinal cord and brains of adult mice.

	Pomc	Penk	Pdyn	Oprm1	Oprd1	Oprk1	Arrb2
Spinal cord	0.7 ± 0.3*	0.8 ± 0.2	1.8 ± 1.2*	1.0 ± 0.4	3.0 ± 2.1*	0.4 ± 0.1*	0.3 ± 0.1*
Brainstem	0.5 ± 0.2*	0.9 ± 0.3	0.7 ± 0.3	1.2 ± 0.8	1.3 ± 0.9	0.9 ± 0.4	0.9 ± 0.2
PFC	0.9 ± 0.2	0.7 ± 0.7	2.5 ± 1.3*	0.9 ± 0.6	1.0 ± 0.4	0.6 ± 0.1*	1.5 ± 1.1
Thalamus	0.7 ± 0.3	1.1 ± 0.7	0.5 ± 0.3	0.4 ± 0.1*	0.7 ± 0.6	0.8 ± 0.3	1.4 ± 0.6
Hypothalamus	0.8 ± 0.5	0.7 ± 0.2	0.8 ± 0.4	1.1 ± 0.2	0.7 ± 0.3	0.9 ± 0.4	1.0 ± 0.5
Hippocampus	0.8 ± 0.4	0.9 ± 0.3	0.8 ± 0.4	0.8 ± 0.3	1.5 ± 0.5*	0.9 ± 0.4	0.5 ± 0.2*

Quantitative PCR was performed on RNA extracted from the spinal cord, brainstem, prefrontal cortex, thalamus, hypothalamus, and hippocampus of adult (postnatal day 60) mice previously exposed to control or fragmented care cages (see Methods). The Student t-test data for each gene expression comparison are summarised in Supplementary Table 2, available at http://links.lww.com/PAIN/B818. Data are the mean expression (with SD) in FC mice expressed relative to the corresponding gene in each region in control mice and are normalised to GAPDH expression using the 2^−ΔΔCT method.

^*P < 0.05 compared with control expression.

PFC, prefrontal cortex.