Discovery of Memory "Glue" Explains Lifelong Recall: KIBRA Protein, PKMzeta
neurosciencenews.com
neurosciencenews.com
> How can short-lived molecules selectively maintain the potentiation of activated synapses to sustain long-term memory? Here, we find kidney and brain expressed adaptor protein (KIBRA), a postsynaptic scaffolding protein genetically linked to human memory performance, complexes with protein kinase Mzeta (PKMζ), anchoring the kinase’s potentiating action to maintain late-phase long-term potentiation (late-LTP) at activated synapses. Two structurally distinct antagonists of KIBRA-PKMζ dimerization disrupt established late-LTP and long-term spatial memory, yet neither measurably affects basal synaptic transmission. Neither antagonist affects PKMζ-independent LTP or memory that are maintained by compensating PKCs in ζ-knockout mice; thus, both agents require PKMζ for their effect. KIBRA-PKMζ complexes maintain 1-month-old memory despite PKMζ turnover. Therefore, it is not PKMζ alone, nor KIBRA alone, but the continual interaction between the two that maintains late-LTP and long-term memory
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35886145 :
> "Representational drift: Emerging theories for continual learning and experimental future directions" (2022) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095943882... :
>> Recent work has revealed that the neural activity patterns correlated with sensation, cognition, and action often are not stable and instead undergo large scale changes over days and weeks—a phenomenon called representational drift
From "Neuroscientists discover mechanism that can reactivate dormant neural stem cells" NSCs (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41875693 :
> "SUMOylation of Warts kinase promotes neural stem cell reactivation" (2024) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-52569-y