Wednesday Nite at the Lab
press release: For the fall semester, WN@TL goes hybrid both with Zoom and with in-person presentations. The zoom registration link is still go.wisc.edu/240r59. You can also watch a live web stream at biotech.wisc.edu/webcams
On March 16, in celebration of Brain Awareness Week, Jerry Yin of Genetics and Neurology in the School of Medicine and Public Health will speak on “What Can Fruit Flies Teach Us About the Persistence of Memory?”
Description: It is now generally accepted that memories involve changing the efficiency of transmission between relevant neurons in specific parts of the brain. Molecules (metabolites, signaling molecules, etc.) and macromolecules (RNAs, proteins and lipids) mediate these processes.
One of the deep problems in neuroscience is how memories can persist for periods of time that far exceed the half-lives of almost all these molecules. This problem is central to an understanding of memory consolidation (the extended process of memory formation) occurs, and how our brain “works." The hippocampus is a key memory/integration center in the mammalian brain. Hippocampal-dependent memories also require extended periods of time (weeks) to form, a process known as “systems consolidation.”
Both these temporal properties (duration and the time required for consolidation) are mysterious, especially given that the best known “memory molecules” (eg. CaM kinase, protein kinase A, PKMz, CREB, CPEB, Arc, BDNF etc.) need to be replenished, and require acute neuronal activity to catalyze their activation.
Long after training, how are these molecules replenished, and what activities catalyze their activation? In this talk, we will discuss new insights into this process using the Drosophila (fruit fly) model system. Oscillatory processes (which can persist forever) and their associated molecules are likely important for memory consolidation.
Bio: Jerry Yin is a professor in the departments of genetics and of neurology in the UW-Madison School of Medicine & Public Health. He studied at Princeton University and then received his PhD in molecular biology from UW-Madison. He was a post-doc at MIT and then at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he was promoted first to assistant professor and then to associate professor before coming to UW-Madison in 2004. He is known for showing the transcription factor CREB is important for the formation of long-term memory.
Explore More:
"Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior” by Jonathan Weiner (about Seymour Benzer)
"In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind” by Eric Kandel
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