Flash Memory

Will you remember seeing this image in a week’s time? If you do, it’ll be because right now new proteins are being made at lightning speed in your brain. Protein production is a key part of memory formation. To identify precisely which ones arise, and how quickly, researchers introduced mice to new places and observed how proteins were formed in the brain region called the hippocampus. They found that a particular protein, neurogranin, was boosted in mice that’d formed new memories (newly produced neurogranin shown in red/yellow, background levels in green) compared to those that hadn't. And if new neurogranin formation was blocked, they found that mice didn’t remember the new experience, and that the production happens very quickly. Several mental disorders are linked to problems with neurogranin and proteins involved in its production, so in addition to revealing secrets of memory formation, these findings might hint at new potential treatments.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image by Khaled Zemoura
• Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND)
• Published in PNAS, June 2018