Long-term potentiation

Electrophysiology involves using electric conductance to measure the electrical activity of cells and tissues in biological samples. It regulates the electrical activity through a change in voltage or electric current. Specifically, in neuronal cells, it helps in the assessment of action potential, long-term potentiation (LTP) and long term depression (LTD)-all of which play an important role in the synaptic activity of the cell. Patch Clamp technique is one of the widely used electrophysiology studies in neuroscience research. It incorporates the use of a microelectrode with a micropipette that allows drawing a small piece of the cell membrane to study the activity of ion channels. This is one of the intracellular methods of examining electrophysiology, although there are several other extracellular methods as well.…

This sleep deprivation study titled Maternal sleep deprivation at different stages of pregnancy impairs the emotional and cognitive functions, and suppresses hippocampal long-term potentiation in the offspring rats was conducted by six researchers known as Peng, Y., Wang, W., Tan, T., He, W., Dong, Z., Wang, Y., & Han H. They proceeded with this study by obtaining male and female Sprague–Dawley rats from Chongqing Medical University Animal Care Centre. Next, they took these rats to the…

Long lasting forms of synaptic plasticity such as long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD) have been shown to be fundamental cellular mechanisms underlying learning and memory. Induction of LTP occurs concomitantly with learning in the hippocampus of freely-moving animals and is known to prevent occludes subsequent electrical induction of LTP in the hippocampus (Whitlock et al., 2006). Conversely, saturation of hippocampal LTP is also known to interfere with spatial memory…

Hypothesis Statement: The Atypical Protein Kinase C Zeta (PKMz) is the molecular mechanism underlying Long Term Potentiation (LTP) maintenance at the synaptic membrane. Furthermore, this process is regulated at the level of translation of a locally available pool of PKMz mRNA, and can be sustained in part by active PKMz itself, or inhibited via an activity-dependent translation block. Significance: If the effects of a true PKMz conditional knockout result in memory impairments similar to the…

Our logic for choosing kinesin for developing CNS therapeutics is based upon our own research, which found that kinesins are transcriptionally upregulated during memory storage and that they are both necessary and sufficient to induce long-term memory storage (LTM) in the marine snail, Aplysia californica (Puthanveettil et al., 2008; Fig 1). Furthermore, other researchers have also discovered that an increase in specific kinesin function in the mouse forebrain improves working memory (Wong et…

Long-lasting forms of synaptic plasticity such as long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD) have been long thought and now convincingly demonstrated to be fundamental cellular mechanisms in the brain that underlie learning and memory processes. Indeed, induction of LTP is observed coincidently with learning events in the hippocampus of free-moving animals and this learning-induced LTP occludes subsequent electrical induction of LTP in the hippocampus (Whitlock et al., 2006).…

Acetylcholine is a neurotransmitter, which plays a role in synaptic plasticity, learning and memory. It has been observed that there is approximately a 90% loss of acetylcholine in the brains of people afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease (Boeree, 2009). The α-7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (α7- nAChRs) are highly expressed in the hippocampus (Prickaerts et al., 2011). Hippocampal long-term potentiation (LTP) is the constant increase in the efficiency of synaptic transmission. Research…

Number of plasticity studies explained the crucial role of Short Term synaptic Plasticity (STP) in modulating the timing of signal processing through mediating the driven input frequency and filtering the signal propagation which is required for maintaining network activity (Tsodyks et al., 1998; Dittman et al, 2000 and Wang et al., 2006). In parallel, other studies revealed the intricate details of the neurobiological explanation implicated in STP (Loebel et al., 2002 and Barak et al., 2007).…

An average person can remember things that happen in their lives whether it be for a short time, or a long time. There are many factors involving the memory of the brain such as sleep. The human brain is a unique and amazing place where one can store things about their life. Some would say, that the human memory is like a huge library of moments stored throughout our brains. In my opinion, this is a great process is that if we are experiencing something new in our life, we can go and look up a…

My research interests are focused on molecular mechanisms of memory formation during infancy. I’m very interested in exploring how experiences during infancy results in hippocampal long-lasting changes, which influence adult behavior. Traumatic early life experiences can predispose individuals to psychopathologies, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), borderline personality disorder, addiction, depression and anxiety1-4. Paradoxically, episodic memories formed during infancy are…