Valproic acid modulates brain plasticity through epigenetic chromatin remodeling in the blind rat: implications for...

Blindness is a pervasive sensory condition that imposes diverse difficulties to carry on with activities of daily living. In blind individuals, the brain is subjected to a large scale reorganization characterized by expanded cortical territories associated with somatosensory and auditory functions and the recruitment of the former visual areas to perform bimodal somatosensory and auditory integration. This poses obstacles to efforts aimed at reassigning visual functions to the recruited visual cortex in the blind, especially after the end of the ontogentic sensitive period. Devising pharmacological measures to modulate the magnitude of brain plasticity could improve our chances of recovering visual functions in the blind. Here, by using the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) in the rat as a working model, we showed that valproic acid administered through the mother's milk prevents cortical reorganization in blinded rats by delaying neuronal histone de-acetylation. These results suggest that in the future, we might be able to devise epigenetic pharmacological measures that could improve our chances of reassigning visual functions to the once deprived former visual cortex in the blind, by modulating the magnitude of brain plasticity during critical times of development.