Climate-influenced performance and offspring development of merino sheep in a dry temperate-cold valley.

This study aims to explore the effects of climate on the performance and offspring development of aged Merino sheep relocated from an arid, cold environment with harsh grazing conditions to a dry, temperate-cold valley with irrigated pasture production. We utilized time series data from merino sheep in a dry temperate-cold climate in southern Argentina to characterize their growth curves, assess the impact of climate on performance, and compare offspring growth with maternal growth. Our approach involved developing a dynamic model, a non-autonomous differential equation growth curve based on the widely used Brody model.

Repeated maternal separation: Alcohol consumption, anxious behavior and corticosterone were reversed by a non-pharmacological treatment.

Adverse events in early life have been related to a maladaptive stress response during adulthood, which could predispose individuals to psychiatric and physiological disorders. The purpose of this work was to study the implications of repeated maternal separation (RMS) plus a physical stressor (cold stress), voluntary ethanol consumption and plasmatic levels of corticosterone (Cor) via conflict behavior tests. To this aim, pups were separated daily from their mothers for one hour and subjected to cold stress (4 °C) between postnatal days (PD) 2 and 20.

Long-term effects of repeated maternal separation and ethanol intake on HPA axis responsiveness in adult rats.

It has been shown that early life manipulations produce behavioral, neural, and hormonal effects. The long term consequences of repeated maternal separation (RMS) plus cold stress and ethanol intake were evaluated during adolescence and adult rats on hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis in male adult Wistar rats. RMS+ cold stress was applied from postnatal day (PD) 2 in which the pups were separated from their mothers and exposed to cold stress (4°C) 1h per day for 20days; controls remained with their mothers.

Chronic postnatal stress induces voluntary alcohol intake and modifies glutamate transporters in adolescent rats.

Postnatal stress alters stress responses for life, with serious consequences on the central nervous system (CNS), involving glutamatergic neurotransmission and development of voluntary alcohol intake. Several drugs of abuse, including alcohol and cocaine, alter glutamate transport (GluT). Here, we evaluated effects of chronic postnatal stress (CPS) on alcohol intake and brain glutamate uptake and transporters in male adolescent Wistar rats.

The response to postnatal stress: amino acids transporters and PKC activity.

It is well known that animals exposed to stressful stimuli during their early life develop different neurological disorders when they become adults. In this study, we evaluated the effect of acute cold stress on gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) and L-Serine (L-Ser) transporters in vitro, using the uptake of [(3)H]-GABA and [(3)H]L-Ser by synaptosomes-enriched fractions isolated from rat cerebral cortex during postnatal development. GABA and L-Ser uptake studies in vitro will be used in this investigation as a colateral evidence of changes in the expression of transporters of GABA and L-Ser.