神经科学
即刻早期基因
前额叶皮质
扁桃形结构
记忆巩固
突触可塑性
基底外侧杏仁核
基因表达
神经可塑性
心理学
生物
下调和上调
基因
海马体
认知
遗传学
受体
作者
Dillingham Bc,P. Simmons Cameron,Simon Pieraut,Cardozo Lm,Yoo Ej,Anton Maximov,Lisa Stowers,Mark Mayford
摘要
Abstract The stabilization or consolidation of long-term memories lasting more than a few hours requires new gene expression. While neural activity has been shown to induce expression of a variety of genes within several hours of learning, whether this leads to persistent changes in gene expression that lasts for days or weeks remains unclear. We developed a novel mouse line which expresses Cre recombinase in an inducible manner and used it to examine gene expression in learning-activated neurons of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) one month following contextual fear conditioning. The mPFC is not required for the initial retrieval of contextual memory but becomes necessary after one month, suggesting a slowly developing plasticity. We found a variety of changes in gene expression in learning-activated neural ensembles that were specific to the mPFC. One group of transcriptional changes observed was the coordinated upregulation of presynaptic proteins suggesting a potential learning-induced elaboration of presynaptic terminals. We tested this idea by labeling the projections of mPFC neurons active during initial learning and found an increase in the number of terminals in neurons projecting to the basolateral amygdala at 1 month following training. These results suggest a presynaptic growth mechanism that could account for the enhanced role of the mPFC in fear memory retrieval at long time points after learning.
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