Figure 4.

Behavioral effects of CMS and altered hippocampal BDNF expression in young rats. LV–shBDNF (KD) or LV–shSCR (control) was injected into the dDG of young rats, and their behavioral response to 4 weeks of CMS was evaluated (as detailed in Fig. 1). The young rats were further divided to CMS resilient and nonresilient groups (see Materials and Methods). The behavioral measurements include sucrose preference (A), distance traveled at a novel environment (B), activity at the forced swim test (C), and home-cage locomotion (D). In addition, BDNF protein expression was measured in the dDG of young rats injected with LV–GFP or LV–BDNF (E). Values are mean ± SEM (*p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, relative to the control group, which was infected with the control LV and not subjected to CMS).