On June 9, 2010, a research article from the Laboratory of Dendrite Development and Neural Circuit Formation entitled "Early enriched environment promotes neonatal GABAergic neurotransmission and accelerates synapse maturation" was published in the Journal of Neuroscience. This work was carried out by graduate student Shan He and postdoctoral fellow Jun Ma under the supervision of Dr. Xiang Yu.

Environmental stimulation is critical for brain development. Using neonatal enriched environment (EE) rearing as a paradigm to investigate how environment changes influence neural circuit development, Shan He and Jun Ma found that natural stimulation through EE rearing during the first 2 weeks of mouse postnatal development accelerated maturation of GABAergic and glutamatergic synapses in hippocampus CA1 pyramidal neurons, measured as increased amplitude or frequency of miniature post-synaptic currents and elevated expression of synaptic marker proteins. Importantly, early environmental stimulation through EE rearing accelerated the developmental switch of GABA action from excitation to inhibition. In summary, these results demonstrate that early environmental stimulation through EE rearing enhances GABAergic neurotransmission and accelerates synapse maturation during early postnatal development.

This work was supported by the grants from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Ministry of Science and Technology and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.