The hippocampus is a region of the brain largely responsible for memory formation. Credit: Salk Institute
A combined team of researchers have found 3 types of repressive regulations in the hippocampus of mice that impact memory retention. To gain a better idea of how genes are involved in the memory making process, the researchers trained several mice to fear being put into a cage, by administering electric shocks. They then killed the mice after differing amounts of time had passed (five minutes, ten minutes , a half hour and at four hours) and performed RNA sequencing and ribosome profiling on the hippocampus. Doing so led to the identification of 104 genes that deviated from a control group, each with either translation or transcription differences.
In studying the data, the researchers found 3 types of repressive regulation going on with the genes; the first was with the suppression of ribosomal protein-coding genes, the second was in early translation repression of specific genes, and the third was longer term suppression that occurred later in a subgroup of genes by way of inhibition of estrogen receptor 1 (ESR1/ERα) signaling. They also found that causing genes to overexpress resulted in less memory retention as did forcing activation of ESR1—the latter suggests the receptor plays an essential role in gene regulatory systems in the brain.
The findings by the team suggest that one of the major functions of genes in memory retention is their suppression to prevent too much information being stored. This suggests that genes in the hippocampus play a key role in filtering out information that surrounds a learning event, so that the brain will not be overfilled with unnecessary data. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-10-role-genes-memory-retention.html
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