Maintenance of susceptibility to neurodegeneration following intrastriatal injections of quinolinic acid in a new transgenic mouse model of Huntington's disease

A transgenic mouse model of Huntington's disease (R6/1 and R6/2 lines) expressing exon 1 of the HD gene with 115-150 CAG repeats resisted striatal damage following injection of quinolinic acid and other neurotoxins. We examined whether excitotoxin resistance characterizes mice with mutant huntingtin transgenes. In a new transgenic mouse with 3 kb of mutant human huntingtin cDNA with 18, 46, or 100 CAG repeats, we found no change in susceptibility to intrastriatal injections of the excitotoxin quinolinic acid, compared to wild-type littermates. The new transgenic mice were injected with the same dose of quinolinic acid (30 nmol) as had been the R6 mice. Our findings highlight the importance of studying pathogenetic mechanisms in different transgenic models of a disease. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).