Our paper “Acute exposure to low-level light at night is sufficient to induce neurological changes and depressive-like behavior” has been published in Molecular Psychiatry. This work consists of a series of simple experiments demonstrating that short-duration (3 days) exposure to low levels of light at night can drastically alter depressive-like behavior and hippocampal gene expression. This is also the last paper I have from my graduate school lab ! A little fact about this paper…during the completion of this study we did behavioral testing every day for 2 months (including weekends etc…)!
Our paper demonstrates that low levels of light at night influence the expression of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and its receptors, along with cytokine mRNA, in the murine hippocampus. Pictured above is DyLight-594 labeled tomato lectin (red), which labels all active capillaries in the brain (Credit: JCB)