Repeated VU0155069 Treatment Is Associated with Region- and Pathological Stage-Specific Dendritic Spine Remodeling in Female 3xTg-AD Mice

Abstract

Background: Alzheimers disease (AD) is increasingly recognized as a disorder of synaptic integrity in which changes in dendritic spine abundance and morphology accompany progressive cognitive dysfunction. Phospholipase D1 (PLD1), a regulator of membrane trafficking and cytoskeletal signaling, is aberrantly elevated in AD-related pathological states (ADRD). Previous studies from our lab demonstrated that repeated VU0155069 treatment promotes functional resilience in female 3xTg-AD mice, including improvements in novel-object recognition, fear-conditioning performance, hippocampal LTP, later-stage LTP and LTD, selected neuropathological outcomes, and most importantly, CA1 spine integrity. Objective: To determine how this previously demonstrated functional resilience is represented structurally across cortical, hippocampal, and amygdalar circuits at earlier and later stages of AD-like pathology. Methods: Female 3xTg-AD mice received vehicle or VU0155069 at 1 mg/kg intraperitoneally every other day for one month beginning at 5 or 11 months of age, with Golgi-Cox analysis at 6 or 12 months, respectively. Age-matched vehicle-treated 3xTg-AD littermates served as the primary comparator for evaluating the structural response to pharmacological attenuation of disease-associated PLD1 signaling. Results: Auditory and visual cortical fields showed selective changes in spine-subtype distribution and morphometry. Hippocampal cornu ammonis (CA)2, CA3, and dentate gyrus (DG) exhibited distinct patterns involving spine abundance, density, and geometry, whereas the central, lateral, and basolateral amygdalar nuclei showed nucleus- and stage-dependent remodeling. Across the multiregional dataset, recurring responses comprised spine-subtype redistribution, changes in spine abundance, and morphometric remodeling rather than uniform structural rescue. Conclusions: VU0155069 engages circuit- and pathological stage-specific forms of dendritic spine remodeling across distributed recognition- and associative-memory networks.