How the Binding of Two Brain Molecules Creates Memories That Last a Lifetime

The original version to This story Appear Quanta magazine.

When Todd Squor was about to be 3 years old, his 4 -year -old sister died of leukemia. He said: “An empty bedroom next to my country. “There was this lost person – he never talked about – I had only one memory.” That memory, faded but permanent, was placed on the basement of their home. Saktur asked his sister to read a book for him, and his upbringing: “Go, ask your mother.” Squor Glyth wears the stairs to the kitchen.

It is striking that after more than 60 years, SakeTor remembers this quick childhood moment. The amazing nature of memory is that every remembrance is a physical tracking, printed in the brain tissue by the molecular mechanism of neurons. How is the essence of the moment of living and retrieval at a later time still one of the central questions that were not answered in neuroscience.

Square has become a nerve world in the pursuit of an answer. At New York State University in Brooklyn, he studies the molecules involved in maintaining the nerve links behind the memory. The question, which drew his attention, was always explained for the first time in 1984 by the famous biologist Francis Kreik: How can memories continue for years, and even decades, when the body’s molecules are decomposed and replaced within days or weeks or at most?

In 2024, work alongside a long -term collaborative team Andre Venton, neuroscientist at New York University, Sacker gave a possible interpretation in a paper published in Science progress. The researchers have discovered that the ongoing bond between two protein is linked to the strengthening of clamps, which are the bonds between neurons. It is believed that enhancing intertwining is essential for the formation of memory. With the deterioration of these proteins, the new proteins take their place in a continuous molecular exchange that maintains the integrity of the bond, and thus memory.

“The researchers present” a very convincing issue “that” the interaction between these two molecules is required to store memory. “The results provide a convincing response to the CRICK dilemma, while reconciling the inconsistent time tables to explain how temporary molecules maintain life -long memories.

Molecular memory

Early of his career, Saktor discovered that would constitute the rest of his life. After studying under the leadership of the pioneer of molecular memory James Schwartz at Columbia University, he opened his own laboratory in Suny Downloadate to search for a molecule that may help explain the extent to which memories continue.

The molecule he was looking for will be at the brain points. In 1949, the psychologist Donald Hip suggested that stimulating neurons over and over again strengthens the ties between them, or, as the neurologist Carla Chatz later put: “The cells that shoot together, wire together.” In contracts that followed, many studies have suggested that the more the relationship between nerve cells bearing memories, the better memories continue.

In the early nineties, in a dish in his laboratory, Sacktor motivated a slice of mice – a small area of ​​the brain linked to the memories of events and places, such as Sakektor interacting with his sister in the elder – to activate nervous paths in a way that protects and stores them. Then search for any molecular changes that occurred. Every time you repeat the experiment, he saw high levels of a specific protein inside the clamps. He said: “By the fourth time, I was like, that’s all.”