TY - JOUR T1 - Deficits in Experience-Dependent Cortical Plasticity and Sensory-Discrimination Learning in Presymptomatic Huntington's Disease Mice JF - The Journal of Neuroscience JO - J. Neurosci. SP - 3059 LP - 3066 DO - 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4320-04.2005 VL - 25 IS - 12 AU - Nektarios K. Mazarakis AU - Anita Cybulska-Klosowicz AU - Helen Grote AU - Terence Pang AU - Anton Van Dellen AU - Malgorzata Kossut AU - Colin Blakemore AU - Anthony J. Hannan Y1 - 2005/03/23 UR - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/25/12/3059.abstract N2 - Huntington's disease (HD) is one of a group of neurodegenerative diseases caused by an expanded trinucleotide (CAG) repeat coding for an extended polyglutamine tract. The disease is inherited in an autosomal dominant manner, with onset of motor, cognitive, and psychiatric symptoms typically occurring in midlife, followed by unremitting progression and eventual death. We report here that motor presymptomatic R6/1 HD mice show a severe impairment of somatosensory-discrimination learning ability in a behavioral task that depends heavily on the barrel cortex. In parallel, there are deficits in barrel-cortex plasticity after a somatosensory whisker-deprivation paradigm. The present study demonstrates deficits in neocortical plasticity correlated with a specific learning impairment involving the same neocortical area, a finding that provides new insight into the cellular basis of early cognitive deficits in HD. ER -