Making new memories

Making room for new memories

y faking its own death, Leishmania can gain access to macrophages. Once in the macrophage, say Marcello André Barcinski (Universidade de São Paulo and Instituto Nacional de Câncer, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and colleagues, the fake death signal then suppresses the host's ability to kill the invading parasite. Leishmania makes the fake death B Blocking PS (right) reduces Leishmania infection (arro...

Making Memories Matter

This article reviews some of the neuroendocrine bases by which emotional events regulate brain mechanisms of learning and memory. In laboratory rodents, there is extensive evidence that epinephrine influences memory processing through an inverted-U relationship, at which moderate levels enhance and high levels impair memory. These effects are, in large part, mediated by increases in blood gluco...

Making Cellular Memories

The induction of a protracted response to a brief stimulus is a form of cellular memory. Here we describe the role of transcriptional regulation in both natural and synthetic memory networks and discuss the potential applications of engineered memory networks in medicine and industrial biotechnology.

Making Memories That Last X

New ribosomes for new memories?

Widely thought to be a housekeeping process, the regulation and synthesis of rRNA emerges as a potentially central mechanism for the maintenance of synaptic plasticity and memory. We have recently shown that an essential component of late-phase synaptic plasticity is rRNA biosynthesis - the rate-limiting step in the production of new ribosomes. We hypothesize that a particular population of rib...