CBP is required for establishing adaptive gene programs in the adult brain [p300]

We investigated the impact in transcription, chromatin acetylation and behavior of eliminating either CBP or p300 in excitatory neurons of the adult forebrain. The elimination of CBP reduced the expression of plasticity genes. The importance of CBP became more prominent in paradigms that involved a chronic or recurrent change in transcription, including kindling and neuroadaptation to environmental enrichment, in which CBP loss interfered with the establishment of activity-induced transcriptional and epigenetic adaptive changes in response to stimulus or experience. Comparative analyses in mice lacking CBP's paralog p300 underscored the specificity of CBP function. Overall design: Total RNA from hippocampi from 3- to 6-month-old mice. The recombination of floxed alleles was induced by 5 intragastrical administrations of tamoxifen (Sigma Aldrich, 20 mg/mL dissolved in corn oil) on alternate days (Fiorenza et al., 2016). In all our experiments with ifKOs, we used CaMKIIa-creERT2- littermates treated with tamoxifen as controls.