Can Urinary Ethyl Glucuronide Be Used as a Biomarker of Habitual Alcohol Consumption?

This protocol describes a standard intermittent-access two-bottle choice home cage drinking paradigm to model alcohol consumption in rats. In addition, it provides step-by-step instructions to augment the standard protocol with a DIY lick detection system that enables microstructural analysis of drinking...

Source: Laboratories of Nicholaus Noles, Judith Danovitch, and Cara Cashon—University of Louisville
Infants are one of the purest sources of information about human thinking and learning, because they’ve had very few life experiences. Thus, researchers are interested in gathering data from infants, but as participants in experimental research, they are a challenging group to study. Unlike older children and adults, young infants are unable to reliably speak, understand speech, or...

Glucuronidation, a pivotal phase II biotransformation process, involves the coupling of glucuronic acid to a drug or xenobiotic. Given its widespread occurrence and critical role in drug metabolism, it's considered the most crucial phase II reaction. It enhances the water solubility of substances, aiding their expulsion from the body. The driving force behind these reactions is a group of enzymes known as UDP-glucuronosyltransferases (UGTs). UGTs facilitate the transfer of a glucuronic acid...

We introduce a method for quantifying Stentor habituation using a microcontroller board-linked apparatus that can deliver mechanical pulses at a specified force and frequency. We also include methods for assembling the apparatus and setting up the experiment in a way that minimizes external perturbations.

This manuscript describes a protocol to examine the olfactory system of rodents. The olfactory habituation/dishabituation test will allow investigators to determine whether a mouse habituates to a repeatedly presented odor and whether the mouse demonstrates dishabituation when presented a novel odor.

We describe a rat model of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that reveals the persistent alterations in neuroendocrine function and the delayed long-term, exaggerated fear response, characteristic of PTSD patients. The animal model and methods described here are useful for correlating biomarkers in brain nuclei, which are mechanistic but cannot be measured in patients, with biomarkers in peripheral white blood cells, which...