2024 Seed Grant
Heidi C. Meyer, Ph.D.
Boston University
Women’s Council Seed Grant
Our proposal is motivated by an urgent need to understand aspects of brain development that determine whether an individual will be susceptible to developing a psychiatric disease such as anxiety. Anxiety disorders are very common during adolescence, with diagnoses surging around 13 years of age. When left untreated, this can also mean long-term symptoms are worse. Unfortunately, current treatments for anxiety have limited long-term success for many youths. Our research aims to address this issue by studying how the adolescent brain responds to exposures to threat as well as opportunities to learn safety.
In our first set of experiments, we will use a “memory tagging” tool in mice to tag a memory associated with fear. We will do this in adolescent mice with a history of chronic stress, or control mice with no history of stress. We predict that stressed mice will show a larger group of neurons in their fear memory, and that these neurons will overlap more with newly formed memories – meaning that new experiences are more likely to seem threatening. These results will reveal a neurobiological mechanism for many of the adverse outcomes
we commonly see in individuals with a history of trauma or stress. Understanding the mechanism will allow the field to develop better treatments.
In our own attempt to inform an intervention, our second set of experiments will use the same memory tagging tool to tag a safety memory in adolescent mice. We will then activate this safety memory daily along the same timeline as maturation, until the mice reach young adulthood. We predict that doing so will rescue the effects of early life stress, and lead to reduced anxiety- and depressive-like behaviors in our mice. Overall, our work will shed light into mechanisms of adolescent brain development and forge a path for developing age-tailored treatments to help reduce the burden of anxiety.
