Expression of ventromedial hypothalamus (VMH) from electroconvulsive seizure (ECS) treated C57Bl/6 mice

The ventromedial nucleus of the hypothalamus (VMH) is thought to a satiety center and a potential target for anti-obesity therapy. Electroconvulsive seizure (ECS) therapy is highly effective in psychiatric diseases including depression, but also implicated beneficial effects on other neurological diseases. Although it has been reported that the neurons in the VMH are strongly activated by ECS stimulation, the effect of ECS in this hypothalamic subnucleus remains unknown. To address this issue, we investigated molecular changes in the VMH in response to ECS by utilizing a method of laser-capture microdissection coupled with microarray analysis, and examined behavioral effects of ECS via VMH activation. ECS significantly induced gene expression not only immediate-early genes such as Fos, Fosb and Jun, but also Bdnf, Adcyap1, and Hrh1 in the VMH after a single or repeated stimulus. Mice received one or 7 times shock of ECS and their brains were collected at 2 h (VMH_1stECS2h, VMH_7thECS2h) or 6 h after shock (VMH_1stECS6h, VMH_7thECS6h). The brains of sham-treated animals were collected at 2 h after treatment(VMH_sham). The VMH was microdissected from dehydrated brain sections, and its total RNA was extracted. RNA samples from two or three animals were pooled to minimize the impact of biological variance. After nucleotide amplification by the ovation amplification, the gene expression profiles were obtained by the Affymetrix microarray analysis. The microarray analysis was performed twice using different sets of animals.