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Updated: Jun 23, 2026

Rapid In Situ Hybridization using Oligonucleotide Probes on Paraformaldehyde-prefixed Brain of Rats with Serotonin Syndrome
Published on: September 23, 2015
Frontal-limbic white matter pathway associations with the serotonin transporter gene promoter region (5-HTTLPR)
Jennifer Pacheco1, Christopher G Beevers, Cristina Benavides
1Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, USA. jpacheco@mail.utexas.edu
Abstract:
Variation in the serotonin transporter gene-linked polymorphic region (5-HTTLPR) has been associated with heightened neural activity in limbic and prefrontal regions in response to emotional stimuli. The current study examined whether the 5-HTTLPR polymorphism is also associated with alterations in microstructure of frontal-limbic white matter (WM) tracts. Thirty-seven (mean age, 20.51 years; range, 13-28) female participants were genotyped for the 5-HTTLPR polymorphism. Diffusion MRI was collected and a probabilistically defined tract of the uncinate fasciculus (UF), a WM pathway connecting the amygdala to medial and orbital prefrontal cortex, was used to generate fractional anisotropy (FA) values for participants. Regression analyses indicated a significant inverse association between number of low-expressing 5-HTTLPR alleles and FA values for the left frontal UF region, beta = - 0.42, p = 0.005. Furthermore, there was a positive association between age and FA values for bilateral frontal regions of the UF; these effects explained 39 and 20% of the variance in FA values for left and right frontal regions, respectively. 5-HTTLPR genotype and age appear to independently influence the WM microstructure of the UF. The observed reduction in FA values among low-expressing 5-HTTLPR allele carriers may contribute to biased regulation of emotional stimuli.
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