A caveat to the above hypotheses is that CMS exposure alters basal neurotransmission and this explains the differential effects of WIN in stress and non-stress animals. Therefore, prior to recording a formal baseline, input-output curves were generated on a subset of slices to test this idea. As shown in Fig 3b, no significant differences in fEPSP amplitudes were observed between slices from stress and non-stress animals (p = 0.25, one-way ANOVA), indicating that exposure to CMS did not alter the excitability of these responses.
