Synaptic Tagging in Process of Long-Term Synaptic Plasticity

Long-term synaptic plasticity is the cellular and molecular basis of learning and memory, and the maintenance of their late phases requires both transcription and translation. How targeting gene products shipped from cell body to the few activated synapses in a vast dendritic tree is not yet fully understood. The recent researches demonstrated that the induction of long-term synaptic plasticity could mark an activated synapse by a synaptic tag to capture and utilize synaptic plasticity-related transcriptional products that then serve to stabilize early to late phase of long-term synaptic plasticity. In this review, we outline the advancement in research of synaptic tagging.