The average American consumes almost 42 gallons of artificially sweetened beverages per year and about 66 pounds of sucrose. Although the USFDA supports that aspartame and stevia are safe for consumption, both nutritive and non‐nutritive sweeteners have been shown to negatively impact health. Sucrose causes addictive behaviors as well as excessive release of dopamine. Our study was designed to determine the behaviors and physiological changes in mice associated with consumption of aspartame and stevia when compared with sucrose. We exposed mice to untainted water or water containing 0.2% aspartame, 0.2% stevia, or 0.2% sucrose for 8 weeks, then provided the animals with a two‐bottle, treated and untreated, choice test for an additional week. After 9 weeks of treatment, mice were sacrificed and body composition, blood glucose, and serum insulin were determined. Stevia animals gained significantly more body weight than all other groups (p<0.05) and consumed significantly more food than controls (p<0.05). All treatment animals consumed significantly more fluid than control animals (p<0.05). When provided with the two‐bottle choice, the treated animals chose the sweetened drink significantly more than untreated water (p<0.05), while the control animals consumed water equally from both bottles. Aspartame treated animals had significantly heavier relative heart weights (p<0.05). We found no significant difference in relative liver weights, blood glucose or serum insulin concentrations in this short term test. These results are consistent with previous studies reporting addictive behavior with sucrose consumption. Current work is focused on the presence of brain lesions and dopamine release with exposure to sugar versus substitutes.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.
The American Association of Colleges and Universities has identified participation in research as a high impact practice for undergraduate education. Course‐based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) offer an excellent opportunity for involving the most students in research, especially students who might not be able to participate in research activities outside of class. Despite the benefits, the integration of a CURE in an animal physiology laboratory course can be a challenge when working with vertebrate animals, in part due to the opposing goals of reinforcing scientific skills (e.g., statistical analysis, which requires sufficient sample sizes) versus reducing the total number of research animals. We therefore designed an undergraduate animal physiology laboratory course to test the idea that a themed CURE allows physiology students to practice their scientific skills and produce publishable results within the context of an authentic research project, while decreasing the number of animals used for the course as a whole. To do this, we chose the theme “social isolation and physiology” to contextualize the research within current events and engage students’ curiosity about how social distancing measures necessitated by the COVID‐19 pandemic may influence physiology. To conduct this CURE, a class experiment was designed using 18 female laboratory mice, with 9 female mice in individual housing and 9 female mice in group housing. We then allowed students to develop their own hypotheses and methods to investigate the effects of social isolation on a physiological variable of their choice, using the class set of experimental animals. We used an iterative course design to provide students with the feedback they needed in order to be successful, which included multiple scaffolding assignments, as well as weekly one‐on‐one meetings to discuss their research project with their laboratory instructor. As final products of this project, students gave an oral presentation of their research findings and wrote a paper in manuscript format as would be suitable for scientific publication. At the end of the semester, we administered two surveys (one open‐ended and one Likert‐scale) to assess the impact of this theme‐based CURE on students. Our preliminary findings indicate that this CURE was the first authentic research experience for the majority of our students. Survey responses suggest that students were better able to conceptualize the research process after participating in the CURE and that students viewed themselves as scientists. Furthermore, responses from students highlighted that having the opportunity to face setbacks and troubleshoot problems was a new, but beneficial experience. Taken together, our findings indicate that a themed CURE is a viable model for integrating research experiences into upper level animal physiology laboratory courses.
Social distancing is a critical public health strategy employed to reduce the transmission of respiratory illnesses, such as COVID‐19. Studies conducted throughout the pandemic suggest that social distancing measures, including staying at home, simultaneously lead to an increased experience of isolation and loneliness. Social isolation is of potential concern because previous research in both humans and non‐human animals demonstrates that reduced social interaction has detrimental effects on mental and physical wellness, including an increase in mortality rate. Despite this background, less is known about how social isolation affects physiological parameters in a comprehensive manner, especially in females. We therefore conducted this study to investigate the extent to which social isolation simultaneously impacts multiple physiological and behavioral variables related to stress, metabolism, and reproduction. To do this, we housed three‐week‐old female Swiss‐Webster mice individually or in groups of three for five weeks. We measured body weight and food consumption each week of the experiment. During the last two weeks of treatment, we tracked the estrous cycle, using vaginal cytology to determine estrous states. After four weeks of housing treatment, we used closed system respirometry to measure oxygen consumption rate as an approximation of whole‐body metabolic rate. At the conclusion of the study, we collected blood in order to measure leukocyte counts, blood glucose concentration, and serum estrogen and progesterone concentrations. Individually housed females consistently consumed more food compared to group‐housed females. While there was no effect of social isolation on the length or proportion of time spent in the different estrous phases, the effects of isolation on other physiological variables depended on estrous state. Our preliminary results suggest that body weight, oxygen consumption rate, number of large lymphocytes, blood glucose concentration, and serum progesterone concentration were higher in individually housed females in diestrus, compared to group‐housed females in diestrus. In contrast, serum estrogen concentration was lower in individually housed females in diestrus, compared to group‐housed females in diestrus. Taken together, these findings suggest that social isolation has a substantial body‐wide effect on physiology and health in females, potentially mediated through a direct effect on ovarian hormone secretion. Furthermore, these findings highlight the importance of studying how stressors impact female physiology in naturally cycling animals.
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