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Nature Neuroscience 11, 527–528 (1 May 2008) | doi:10.1038/nn0508-527

How I learned to stop worrying and love calcineurin

Carlos Balet Sindreu & Daniel R Storm

Ever wondered what is it about emotional or traumatic memories that make them more vivid, recurrent and stable than other memories? In this issue, Baumg|[auml]|rtel et al. show that calcineurin (a phosphatase also called PP2B) confers their characteristic dominance and resilience to extinction on emotional memories, even in the face of later events that prove that their maintenance is no longer justified or useful. To study what makes emotional memories persist, the authors chose conditioned taste aversion (CTA), a protocol in which an animal learns to reject an appetitive novel taste (such as saccharin solution) when it is paired with an illness-inducing chemical (LiCl2 injection).