Adolescent Ethanol Exposure Disrupts the Mature Phenotype of Surviving Neuroprogenitors in Female Mice
Kaitlyn Campbell, Madison McDowell, Eymani Alston, Hunter Kelley, Michael Kasten, Paul B Manis, Fulton Crews, Victoria Macht · 2026
Read Adolescent Ethanol Exposure Disrupts the Mature Phenotype of Surviving Neuroprogenitors in Female Mice by Kaitlyn Campbell, Madison McDowell, Eymani Alston, Hunter Kelley, Michael Kasten, Paul B Manis, Fulton Crews, Victoria Macht (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13628545.txt.
Description
Kaitlyn Campbell and seven co-authors ask what becomes of the young brain cells that survive teenage binge drinking, in this 2026 mouse study. Adolescent alcohol exposure is known to cut the birth of new hippocampal neurons and stir immune signaling for the long term. Many newborn neurons do survive, though, and nobody had checked how they mature.
Using mice engineered so newborn neurons glow, the team gave females binge-style alcohol through adolescence, then waited months. The same number of labeled neurons survived, but they grew differently: wider branch trunks, longer wandering paths, more swollen spots on their axons, and fewer spines, with their firing pattern shifted. Nearby immune cells, the microglia, shrank their territories and rounded up where they touched the survivors' branches, a shape linked to reactivity. The authors warn that these lasting changes could warp hippocampal wiring and function.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Kaitlyn Campbell, Madison McDowell, Eymani Alston, Hunter Kelley, Michael Kasten, Paul B Manis, Fulton Crews, Victoria Macht |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 80 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |