Volume 16 Issue 12, December 2011

Elevation of newborn neurons in the dentate gyrus enables the antidepressant Fluoxetine to improve the control on the stress response by hippocampus and then to counteract the detrimental effects of chronic stress. The figure shows the reactivity of the granule cells in the dentate gyrus to novelty exposure: cells are labeled for the neuronal marker NeuN (in blue), the immediate early gene product Fos (‘activated’ granule cells in red) and the proliferation marker BrdU (4 week-old newborn cells in green). For more info on this topic, please refer to the article by Surget et al on pages 1177–1188.