A discovery involving a happy accident and a rat brain may open the door to new drug treatments for memory loss and addiction, neuroscientists at Johns Hopkins University say.
The finding relies on a newly discovered method of memory storage and raises hopes that future drugs could manipulate that process to patients? advantage.
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The type of disorder would determine how such drugs would affect memory formation, lead researcher Dr. David Linden said. Drugs treating addiction ? which Linden said is functionally equivalent to a “super-strong memory” ? would have the opposite effect of those treating memory loss.
Memory is formed when one nerve cell transmits information to another, causing changes in the way they connect with each other, according to the Department of Biological Sciences at Osaka University. Over time, with reinforcement, these changes in connectivity become permanent.
Researchers once believed long-term memories were created by lightning-quick transmissions lasting about 1/100th of a second, but the Hopkins team discovered a slower mechanism for memory storage, which creates impressions through one-second bursts.
The finding is significant because the slow transmissions were found to occur between a particular category of nerve receptors known as mGluR1. This receptor is “strongly implicated not only in memory storage, but also in addiction and epilepsy,” Linden said.
It was something of an accident that the team ever made the finding. A researcher working with mGluR1 noticed that electrical stimulation caused it to send weaker signals. At first, Linden said, the behavior was regarded as an obstruction to his research, but the scientist soon realized its significance: Permanent changes, or memories, were occurring to the transmission strength.
Further tests simulating natural electrical activity in slices of a rat brain confirmed that memories were forming as a result of these slow bursts between receptors. If that was the case, researchers thought, finding a way to regulate these receptors could affect the formation of memories and the effects of memory-related diseases.
“The implication of this for humans is that if you can make drugs that modulate these slow neurotransmitting receptors, they can be potentially relevant for diseases of memory, for addiction and for epilepsy,” Linden said.
The study was funded by the Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare and the National Institutes of Health.
