The Effect of Rotenone Exposure on Brain Health

Epidemiological evidence suggest that pesticides and other environmental exposures may have a role in the etiology of neurological diseases like Parkinson's disease (PD) . This has led to the development of chemically induced models of PD. However, the risk associated of exposure with specific pesticide products, such as rotenone, is controversial as a result of the limitations surrounding the recapitulations of pathological features of PD. PD is pathologically characterized by a progressive degeneration of nigrostriatal dopaminergic neurons in the brain and is clinically diagnosed by somatomotor dysfunction. Although rotenone is used to model PD for research, little studies have broadened the scope of its effects on whole brain health. The purpose of this project is to delineate the risk at which rotenone exhibits effects on cellular and molecular phenotypes using an in vivo mouse model. This study highlights: the neurological susceptibility to long-term intraperitoneal rotenone exposure in younger ages as determined by behavioral abnormalities such as seizures and convulsions, cellular phenotypes, and alterations in histone modifications within adult neurogenic niches. At the cellular level, the effect of rotenone specifically alters the neuronal stem progenitor and mature neuron populations and impacts the maintenance of dividing cells in in the dentate gyrus (DG) of the hippocampus.