Aplysia Pleural Ganglia 24 Hours After Long-Term Sensitization Training

We used a custom-designed microarray and qPCR to characterize the persistent transcriptional response to long-term sensitization training in the marine mollusk Aplysia californica. Aplysia were exposed to a 1-day unilateral LTS training protocol (4 rounds of noxious shock at 30 min intervals, each shock 10s of 1/2s off 1/2on 90mA 60-hz biphasic square-wave shock). Training produced robust sensitization in all animals (measured as an increase in T-SWR response from baseline to 24h after training). Immediately after 24h post-tests, pleural ganglia was harvested. Samples from a left-trained and right-trained animal were combined to smooth out lateralized gene expression. The pleural ganglia contains the VC nociceptors, which are thought to play a primary role in expressing LTS memory. Within-subjects comparison. Each array is a two-color approach hybridized to a matched trained and untrained set of samples (with each sample containing tissue from a left- and right-trained animal). Conducted with 8 biological replicates, meaning 8 arrays, each comparing paired trained and untrained samples.