Influence of environmental enrichment on morphine-exposed neonate rats : effect on neurodevelopment and long-term memory

The stressful stimuli exposure and the use of drugs in early life may affect neurodevelopment, altering behaviors, memory and nociceptive response. These factors have been related to the delay in recovery of patients after medical procedures in hospitals. In this study, we investigated the influence of environmental enrichment (EE) on morphine exposure effect on neurodevelopment and memory of neonate rats. 28 pups were divided into four experimental groups: saline + standard housing (SS), saline + environmental enrichment (SE), morphine + standard housing (MS) and morphine + environmental enrichment (ME). The newborns received daily (P8-P14) subcutaneous injections of saline (5 μl) or morphine (5 μg/5 μl), and they were submitted to manipulation or EE (P8-P21). The righting reflex and the negative geotaxis, the object recognition and the hot plate tests were used to evaluate neuromotor reflexes, long-term memory and thermal hyperalgesia, respectively. Animals that received morphine showed longer neuromotor reflexes response time compared to the saline group, an effect that was age-dependent. Animals that received morphine showed less ability to recognize a new object in the environment, an effect that was partially reversed by EE. Nociceptive response was not altered for morphine nor EE. These findings demonstrate that neonatal morphine exposure alters the neurodevelopment and long-term memory in pup rats, without affecting nociceptive response. Thus, EE can be a promising non-pharmacological treatment to the consequences of neonatal noxious stimuli

Pervasive gaps in Amazonian ecological research

Biodiversity loss is one of the main challenges of our time,1,2 and attempts to address it require a clear un derstanding of how ecological communities respond to environmental change across time and space.3,4 While the increasing availability of global databases on ecological communities has advanced our knowledge of biodiversity sensitivity to environmental changes,5–7 vast areas of the tropics remain understudied.8–11 In the American tropics, Amazonia stands out as the world’s most diverse rainforest and the primary source of Neotropical biodiversity,12 but it remains among the least known forests in America and is often underrepre sented in biodiversity databases.13–15 To worsen this situation, human-induced modifications16,17 may elim inate pieces of the Amazon’s biodiversity puzzle before we can use them to understand how ecological com munities are responding. To increase generalization and applicability of biodiversity knowledge,18,19 it is thus crucial to reduce biases in ecological research, particularly in regions projected to face the most pronounced environmental changes. We integrate ecological community metadata of 7,694 sampling sites for multiple or ganism groups in a machine learning model framework to map the research probability across the Brazilian Amazonia, while identifying the region’s vulnerability to environmental change. 15%–18% of the most ne glected areas in ecological research are expected to experience severe climate or land use changes by 2050. This means that unless we take immediate action, we will not be able to establish their current status, much less monitor how it is changing and what is being lostinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Estimating the global conservation status of more than 15,000 Amazonian tree species

Estimates of extinction risk for Amazonian plant and animal species are rare and not often incorporated into land-use policy and conservation planning. We overlay spatial distribution models with historical and projected deforestation to show that at least 36% and up to 57% of all Amazonian tree species are likely to qualify as globally threatened under International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List criteria. If confirmed, these results would increase the number of threatened plant species on Earth by 22%. We show that the trends observed in Amazonia apply to trees throughout the tropics, and we predict thatmost of the world’s >40,000 tropical tree species now qualify as globally threatened. A gap analysis suggests that existing Amazonian protected areas and indigenous territories will protect viable populations of most threatened species if these areas suffer no further degradation, highlighting the key roles that protected areas, indigenous peoples, and improved governance can play in preventing large-scale extinctions in the tropics in this century