Discover - Exposing the memory engine: The story of PKMzeta
We’re used to the idea that we become more forgetful with age. As time passes, our memories naturally fade and weaken, and that’s if we’re lucky enough to avoid traumatic accidents or diseases like Alzheimer’s. But Reut Shema, from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, has found a possible way of preventing this decline, and even reversing it…
“People have done science where you block things to see what happens, but you don’t really know what’s going on,” explains Karim Nader, a memory researcher at Â鶹AV University, who has worked with Sacktor before. "You think it’s the equivalent of a smart bomb, but maybe it’s a dirty bomb. You block something in the brain and there are eight million things that could happen. So you have to enhance it and see if you have the opposite effect.”
And that’s exactly what Shema has now done. Once again, she taught rats to avoid the taste of sweetener. This time, a few days before their training, she infected the rats’ brains with viruses carrying PKMzeta. With extra copies of the protein at hand, the rats were more likely to remember their distaste for sweetener. Even if Shema injected the viruses a week after the rats’ training, when their aversion to the sweetener had started to fade, the extra PKMzeta enhanced their dulled memories.
“That’s the grand slam,” says Nader. “It’s got to be that molecule.”