Behavioural and brain ultrastructural changes following the systemic administration of propionic acid in adolescent male rats. Further development of a rodent model of autism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Short chain fatty acids, produced as gut microbiome metabolites but also present in the diet, exert broad effects in host physiology. Propionic acid (PPA), along with butyrate and acetate, plays a growing role in health, but also in neurological conditions. Increased PPA exposure in humans, animal models and cell lines elicit diverse behavioural and biochemical changes consistent with organic acidurias, mitochondrial disorders and autism spectrum disorders (ASD). ASD is considered a disorder of synaptic dysfunction and cell signalling, but also neuroinflammatory and neurometabolic components. We examined behaviour (Morris water and radial arm mazes) and the ultrastructure of the hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex (electron microscopy) following a single intraperitoneal (i.p.) injection of PPA (175 mg/kg) in male adolescent rats. PPA treatment showed altered social and locomotor behaviour without changes in learning and memory. Both transient and enduring ultrastructural alterations in synapses, astro- and microglia were detected in the CA1 hippocampal area. Electron microscopic analysis showed the PPA treatment significantly decreased the total number of synaptic vesicles, presynaptic mitochondria and synapses with a symmetric active zone. Thus, brief systemic administration of this dietary and enteric short chain fatty acid produced behavioural and dynamic brain ultrastructural changes, providing further validation of the PPA model of ASD.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".