EN
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative syndrome with high prevalence in the elderly population and whose early symptoms include impairment in spatial memory. Inherited forms of AD can be caused by dominant, single missence mutations in the Amyloid Precursor Protein (APP) gene, and this has been used to generate several animal models for the disease by overexpression of a mutated version of the protein. We have established at our institute a breeding colony of transgenic mice expressing the London mutation of APP as a transgene (APP[V717I]), and tested them at three and six months of age on the Morris Water Maze to confi rm a previous report on their impairment in the acquisition of this particular task. Moreover, APP[V717I] mice were used as a model to determine whether treatment with the tripeptide RER, a compound that has previously been shown to ameliorate amyloidinduced amnesia in young chicks, is capable of modifying their performance in the maze in a way that compensates the defi cits in spatial memory derived from the expression of the transgene. This work was supported by Grant #88 provided by the Alzheimer’s Society.