By: Jocelyn Rice, Technology Review
Friday, February 22, 2008

Steve Maren quoted in Technology Review

February 22, 2008

From the article:

A new strain of genetically engineered mice has allowed researchers to pinpoint, for the first time, the precise cellular connections that form as a memory is created...

"It's a first step in visualizing the synapses that encode memories," says Stephen Maren, director of the neuroscience graduate program at the University of Michigan, who was not involved with the research. "We really haven't had a tool like this to see memory encoding at a synaptic level. It's an exciting paper."

"We are developing techniques that allow us to focus on the actual physical sites that are changing in the brain with learning, at finer and finer resolution," says the study's lead investigator, Mark Mayford, associate professor of cell biology at the Scripps Research Institute.

Neuroscientists believe that in order for a memory to form, individual synaptic connections must be strengthened in response to a memory-generating stimulus. This strengthening is likely the result of a specific set of proteins migrating to synapses in a precisely choreographed pattern, but it remains a mystery which proteins are involved and how they are targeted to their destinations. The new study, which appears in today's issue of Science, is the first to trace a particular protein as it makes its way to particular synapses.

...The receptor's "preference" for mushroom-type synapses suggests that, at least in the process of forming a fear-related memory, there is a specialized trafficking system to direct synaptic proteins to their targets. "But what sort of molecular flag gets waved to say, 'Come up here and make your home at my type of synapse,' is not really clear," says Maren...

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To read the entire article, visit the Technology Review website at http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/20320/.