The importance of serotonin in exercise-induced adult neurogenesis: new evidence from Tph2-/- mice.

Beckman D, Santos LE.

J Neurosci. 2013 Sep 4;33(36):14283-4. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2911-13.2013.

This is a journal club article which is a short review of recent papers in the Journal of Neuroscience.  It's a great way to get the skinny on new papers being published in the journal.  Typically these are done by students and postdocs to summarize the important findings of papers in their as well as provide additional insight and commentary.

The particular Journal Club deals with the topic of 5HT or serotonin and its role in exercise-induced neurogenesis, or the formation of new brain cells in the brain.  Only until recently was it believed that the brain only produced a fixed number of cell and even then these have been restricted to the dentate gyrus and olfactory bulb.  Although we are doing some studies to address whether there are different numbers of certain types  of neurons, we don't know if this is because the neurons we study are changing phenotypes or if they are going through apoptosis and/or whether they going through neurogenesis.  Again we study relative changes between groups so still don't know if it's the exercise or the inactivity causing changes.

Anyway this is nice quite read implicated the role of serotonin in exercise induced neurogensis.  Dr. Mateika has some of these animals so he and are going to discuss the paper with him and see what kind of avenues we can pursue.

PJM