IUBio

Long Term Potentiation & Memory

Bill Skaggs skaggs at bns.pitt.edu
Mon May 31 13:59:27 EST 1999


james.teo at chch.ox.ac.uk (Millennial Dragon) writes:
> 
> For starters nowadays, LTP seems to be not synapse-specific due to
> proposed retrograde messengers (arachidonic acid and nitric oxide),
> and not entirely NMDA-receptor-dependent.
> Also, most studies of LTP work on the hippocampus. I don't know the
> details of other tissue but there have been cases of LTP spotted (and
> not spotted) in other brain tissue (eg: cerebellum, amygdala). Anyone
> who knows more, do fill us in on that.
> Then there is the behavioural link between LTP and memory. There are
> many instances of pharmacological blockade of LTP (eg: AP5
> injections), and initially rats performed badly in spatial tasks (like
> the water maze). But recently, there is some question on that as rats
> pretrained had no such impairment. Also gene 'knock-out' mice had no
> problems in functioning. What do you people make out of that?

In my opinion the case for LTP as a mechanism of memory is as strong
as it has ever been, if not stronger.  In any investigation of a
phenomenon as complicated as neural plasticity, there are bound to be
a few false starts and temporarily inexplicable difficulties, but the
crucial observations remain unchallenged: LTP is a long-lasting
Hebbian form of plasticity that is easily induced when pre- and
post-synaptic cells are made to fire in the same sort of temporal
patterns seen in hippocampal neurons under natural conditions.

	-- Bill Skaggs



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