Background: Facing environmental factors during early postnatal life, directly or indirectly via mother-infant relationships, profoundly affects the structure and function of the mammals’ Central Nervous System (CNS). Objectives: This study aimed to evaluate the effect of morphine consumption during the lactation period on short-term synaptic plasticity of the hippocampal Cornu Ammonis 1 (C...

Hippocampal neural stem/progenitor cells (hipp-NS/PCs) of the adult mammalian brain are important sources of neuronal and gial cell production. In this study, the main goal is to investigate the plasticity of these cells in neuronal/astroglial differentiations. To this end, the differentiation of the hipp-NS/PCs isolated from 3-month-old Wistar rats was investigated in response to the embryonic...

Using the think/no-think paradigm (Anderson & Green, 2001), researchers have found that suppressing retrieval of a memory (in the presence of a strong retrieval cue) can make it harder to retrieve that memory on a subsequent test. This effect has been replicated numerous times, but the size of the effect is highly variable. Also, it is unclear from a neural mechanistic standpoint why preventing...

Previous studies have shown that the receptive field properties, spontaneous activity and spatio-temporal interactions of low-threshold mechanical somatosensory cells in the barrel cortex are influenced by C-fibers. In this study, we examined the effect of C-fiber depletion on response properties of barrel cortex neurons following experience dependent plasticity. Methods: In this study, exte...

Neurexins and neuroligins are cell adhesion molecules that form transsynaptic interactions. In this issue of Neuron, Choi et al. report that neurexin-neuroligin signaling plays a critical role in functional and structural synaptic plasticity underlying memory formation in Aplysia.

In many regions of the brain, the activity-dependent changes in synaptic strength depend on the frequency and timing of presynaptic stimulation and postsynaptic activity (synaptic plasticity), as well as the history of activity at those synapses (metaplasticity). The Bienenstock, Cooper and Munro (BCM) theory made several assumptions about how synapses modify and these have helped to guide vari...