06
Feb
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It is key to treating diseases like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's
An investigation by the University of Haifa identified a protein essential to the process of memory consolidation in the long term key to treating diseases like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's.
This is the latest in a series of studies aimed at better understanding the process of creation and consolidation of memory in the human brain, recently published by the journal Nature Neuroscience, "reads a statement from the university.
Previous research by the academic center in the laboratory of "Molecular Mechanisms of Learning and Memory" had identified a protein directly linked to the quality of long-term memory.
But the latest study focuses on a protein during the process of memory formation and shows that, in fact, is an essential
factor in this process, the team of scientists led by Prof. Kobi Rosenblum, Head of Department of Neurobiology and Ethology at the University of Haifa.
The researchers used a standard of taste learning in mice, to discover that occurs during the same protein PSD-95 in the "pleasure center" of the cerebral cortex.
However, adds the note, when the mouse was exposed to unfamiliar tastes, the PSD-95 was not produced in this center of the brain cortex.
To demonstrate that that protein is essential for memory creation process, researchers used two different groups of rodents that had undergone the same tests for taste learning.
Using genetic engineering stopped the segregation of the PSD-95 in nerve cells of the "pleasure center" in the brain of one of the groups and found that these mice had no memory of new tastes a day after their exposure to them, unlike the other group.
The scientists showed that the new memory and is created when there was the PSD-95 and that the information disappeared from the brain when the protein was not induced.
The study also analyzed the effect of producing this protein in existing memories.
Thus, mice that had previously been led to remember certain tastes were genetically engineered to stop producing the protein and kept remembering the tastes, which showed that while production of PSD-95 is essential for the creation of the memory, its absence does not affect retention.
"One of the first processes that are affected in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's are the acquisition and memory processing," explains Prof. Rosenblum.
It adds that "the better we understand the elements involved in these complicated processes before we are able to develop medications that slow the progression of cognitive degenerative diseases and enable patients to continue to function normally."
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