Skip to main content
. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2023 Nov 5.
Published in final edited form as: Cell Rep. 2023 Sep 19;42(9):113151. doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2023.113151

Figure 3. Gnaq(Q209L) increases immediate early gene expression and improves memory in aged mice (A and B).

Figure 3.

(A) Twenty-four-month-old mice were injected with a viral vector expressing either GFP or GNAQ(Q209L) in adult hippocampal neurons. (B) Representative image of viral expression (GFP) in hippocampus. Scale bar, 200 μm.

(C) After recovery, aged mice were tested in novel object recognition and radial arm water maze tasks and then euthanized at ~26 months of age for histology and single-nucleus RNA sequencing.

(D) Expression of phosphorylated Creb (pCreb) protein in the dentate gyrus (DG) of the hippocampi of aged mice following neuronal Gnaq(Q209L) was increased relative to GFP control expression. Representative image; scale bar, 100 μm.

(E and F) Expression of (E) Arc and (F) Egr1 was increased in the CA1 and DG regions in Gnaq(Q209L) mice relative to GFP control. Representative images; scale bars, 200 μm.

(G) Representative nests, where 1 shows a poor, 3 an average, and 5 a perfect nest. GNAQ(Q209L) mice built significantly better nests than GFP controls, indicating better well-being.

(H) GNAQ(Q209L) mice showed no differences from GFP controls in the Y-maze test (short-term memory).

(I) GNAQ(Q209L) mice had improved 24-h long-term memory on the novel object recognition task.

(J) GNAQ(Q209L) mice had improved long-term memory (blocks 6–10) compared with GFP controls. Each dot represents one mouse. Mean ± SEM. Unpaired Student’s t test (D–G, I) or ANOVAs followed by post hoc corrections (H, J) were used. *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001.