Old Memories

As we get older, many of us will find our memory starts to struggle a little. One reason for this is that our neural stem cells – cells in our brain that produce new brain cells throughout life – slow down their production. A new study has shown that this diminishing is precipitated by a reduction in a particular protein, lamin B1 (red in the mouse hippocampus pictured). Without it, as stem cells (blue) divide into two daughter cells, the usual process that carefully allocates any harmful lingering proteins is hampered. The resulting cells are less well equipped to produce new neurons, meaning we find new memories hard to form and old ones hard to grasp. Promisingly, providing extra lamin B1 restored stem cell division and new neuron production ramped up. If the approach could be applied in humans, it might delay many aspects of ageing, and protect our valuable memories.

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 from work by Muhammad Khadeesh bin Imtiaz and colleagues
• Laboratory of Neural Plasticity, Faculties of Medicine and Science, Brain Research Institute, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Cell Stem Cell, February 2021