This core is an essential component of the research program in its study of neurocognitive aging,providing an Animal Resource that serves each of the individual projects. A major objective of the overallresearch program is to elucidate the basis of neurocognitive aging in behaviorally characterized healthyaged rats. The overall research program further exploits the feature of individual differences inneurocognitive aging, a phenomenon that is well-documented in humans and captured in the animal modelused in this research.The Animal Resource maintains a colony of pathogen-free male Long-Evans rats, which are additionallyscreened for disability and physiological impairment. All rats in the Animal Resource undergo assessmentof cognitive function in a standardized protocol for 'place' and 'cue' learning in a water maze apparatus.The Animal resource provides analysis of these results to characterize presence/severity of impairment.Additional behavioral testing in this core will occur as specified for individual projects. Material from animalsin the resource is then obtained for the projects, in a form appropriate to the methods used in theneurobiological studies (sacrifice/perfusion/dissection). In some instances live animals will be transferred 'from the Resource to projects for further in vivo analysis (i.e., electrophysiological recording) or to providefresh tissue as needed for in vitro studies. In those cases Core B personnel work with the AdministrativeCore to obtain health certificates and prepare rats for shipping in an expedited manner. The AnimalResource Core compiles records on animal health, inventory, and analysis of the behavioral assessments,all in an archived form.In addition to providing rodent material for current projects, Core B also banks tissue specimens(dissected brain regions, peripheral organ tissues, blood samples) to be used at a later date by projectinvestigators or outside scientists, This resource sharing activity is managed and coordinated by theAdministrative Core (Core A). In an expanded set of objectives in the research program for the next fundingcycle, Core B will also provide a resource of non-human primate tissue on young and aged monkeys thathave been behaviorally characterized (behavioral studies conducted under the auspices of a separatefunding mechanism RO1 AG10606 'Cognitive Function in the Aged Monkey). Thus, as promising resultsemerge for the rat model that has comprised the major focus of our efforts, we are uniquely positioned totest the generality of these findings in a well-characterized non-human primate model.
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