Multi-circuit Recording in Animal Models of Parkinson's Disease

Abstract
One of the main features of Parkinson’s disease is the neurodegeneration of the dopaminergic neurons of the substantia nigra pars compacta which causes a fall of the levels of dopamine in the striatum. This leads to alterations of the neural activity in all the structures of the loop circuit formed by the cortex, the basal ganglia, and thalamus. These alterations are believed to underlie the bradykinesia and hypokinesia observed in Parkinson’s disease. To study the correlation or the causality between circuitry neural activity and specific parkinsonian motor symptoms, the circuit can be interrogated by simultaneous extracellular recordings in diverse brain structures in behaving freely moving animals modeling Parkinson’s disease. Hereby, we describe the procedure to obtain the classical 6-hydroxydopamine Parkinson’s model combined with multi-area extracellular recordings in small behaving animals to access the activity of the parkinsonian cortico-basal ganglia-thalamo-cortical loop. Given that both the dopaminergic lesion caused by 6-hydroxydopamine, and the quality of the extracellular recordings have temporal dynamics of their own, the relative timing of both procedures is essential to obtain successful recording with high-quality signals.
Description
Keywords
6-hydroxydopamine, Cortex, Electrode array chronic implant, Extracellular recordings, Parkinson’s disease, Striatum, Thalamus
Citation