We hope you GOOD LUCK in your interesting up-to-date research project.

1-  Preclinical research in rodents suggested that certain probiotics have antidepressant and anxiolytic activities. Effects may be mediated via the immune system or neuroendocrine systems. 

2- drug -drug interaction between "antibiotics with enzyme inhibition effect  as quinolones, erythromycin for example from one side" and antidepressants metabolized by cytochrome enzyme system from the other side " please refer to www.lexicomp,com--------- clinical drug information

3- Please find attached important scientific articles :

GOOD LUCK

There is certainly a relation between gut microbiome composition and behaviour, and certain antibiotics (i.e. minocycline, which down regulates caspase1, caspase3 and iNOS) have been shown to have antidepressant effects while other antibiotics cause gut dysbiosis leading to increased immune activation which in turn leads to depression. 

I think the final question in the gut-behaviour debate is: which bacteria or group of bacteria increase the likelihood of developing depression and/or co-morbid systemic illnesses?

This is a paper that has been published recently of minocycline trialled for depression in australia

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0004867417709357 

and this is a paper that my group recently published investigating the antidepressant effects of minocycline in a mouse model of depression and its effects on gut microbiome composition (some species of bacteria that are known to affect inflammation were up- or down-regulated following stress and/or minocycline treatment)

http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/v21/n6/full/mp201646a.html

I hope this helps

What kind of stress model are you going to use for your project?

Best regards,

Antonio Inserra

Thanks for the help Prof. Sarah Kamal and  Prof. Antonio Inserra. I am also willing to share ideas on this interesting subject.

Dear Prof. Antonio Inserra,

We will make a 21-day chronic model with behavioral changes according to the article below:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5043644/

Dear Prof. Antonio Inserra,

We will make a 21-day chronic model with behavioral changes according to the article below:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5043644/

If there is a suggestion, I am open to talk.

Dear José Eduardo Ribeiro Honório Junior, do you think 21 days will be enough to create a depressive-like state in the test animals? The article you mentioned uses a 5 weeks (35 days protocol)

Best regards,

Antonio

Dear professorAntonio Inserra, it really is 35 days anyway. Sorry for my confusion because we have another protocol of 21 days with cortecosterone, that we also use for other experiments.

What protocol do you use?

Ok, that makes sense. In the past we used chronic restraint stress (4-6 hours/day) for 14 days. However, this protocol in our facility did not decrease sucrose preference test (a test to assess anhedonic-like behaviour). Therefore we started using unpredictable chronic mild stress for 28 days and that did decrease sucrose preference.

One thing to keep in mind is that C57BL6 mice are quite stress-resilient, so if you have other strains available which are more susceptible to stress (I believe BALB-C and CD-1 strains are more stress-susceptible), that might be a good alternative (or even use both strains) 

Best regards,

Antonio

Dear Jose

Actually in animal stress models , you must keep in mind the important imformation about mice or rat strains as mentioned above by professor Antonio Inserra

However, in our lab: we perform both chronic restraint model for 21 days according to a protocol done by the authors that measure " serum corticosterone" as a marker of induction of stress " attached reference"

While chronic mild stress developed by Willner et al, since 1989 , who proved its face, construct validity whith its reliability , we measure the stress in the animals , mice or rats , by sucrose preference test or sucrose consumption test, but the most accurate accorsing to many studies is the sucrose consumption test.

You can refer to the original authors of these models to help you selecting the appropriate one for your project or you can do pilot studies and compare the results by stat. tests for validity and reliabilty to your aim of work.

Please find attached 2 guiding references for chronic restraint and CMS , GOOD LUCK 

i am sorry : sucrose preference test is preferred to be done in CMS than sucrose consumption test...... sorry for the mistake above

Dear Sahar,

Thank you. We have already used the sucrose preference test. I already had some works by Wilhmer, but I have not yet 2017. We also used tail-suspension and forced swimming tests for acute depression protocols.

Dear Antonio

I did not know that the C57BL6 mice were stress-resilient. In fact, we have a project that will start next month with this strain. We do not have BALB-C and CD-1 yet.

I would like to request the contact email to send you one of our chronic stress protocols for you (Sahar and Antonio) to analyze.

I really enjoyed our conversation and hope to continue exchanging ideas.

Dear Jose

Thanks a lot for your kind appreciaiton.

my email is : [email protected]

You are most welcome to exchange or to discuss with me models of animal stress simulating human stress/depression/anxiety models. We also did lab.work on tail suspension or forced swimming tests on mice or rats.

Good Luck

Dear Jose, sure thing. My email address is [email protected] and I'd be happy to correspond anytime.

What I meant about C57BL6 being stress-resilient is that in our lab we were not able to induce anhedonic-like behaviour as measured by the sucrose preference test, although these mice did show increased depressive-like behaviour in the forced swim test. As mentioned by Sahar, it might be a good idea to do a corticosterone ELISA to assess the corticosterone levels of these mice.