Abstract
DURING the past six years a remarkable series of publications has appeared, claiming the transfer of various specific learned behaviours from animal to animal by i.p. injection of extracts made from brains of trained donors. These are cited in the latest paper1, in which Ungar and his colleagues propose an amino acid sequence for a pentadecapeptide isolated from the brains of donor rats trained to avoid a dark box. Injection of this material into untrained recipient mice is alleged to transfer the learned dark avoidance. The molecule has been named scotophobin, after the Greek words meaning “fear of the dark”.
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Change history
01 April 1973
IN the article "Comments on the Isolation, Identification and Synthesis of a Specific-Behaviour-Inducing Brain Pep-tide" by Avram Goldstein (Nature, 242, 60; 1973) the first sentence of paragraph 2 should read: "The long controversy over the claims for transfer of learned behaviours was reviewed by W.
References
Ungar, G., Desiderio, D. M., and Parr, W., Nature, 238, 198 (1972).
Stewart, W. W., Nature, 238, 202 (1972).
Goldstein, A., Sheehan, P., and Goldstein, J., Nature, 233, 126 (1971).
Ungar, G., in Methods in Pharmacology, chapter 16 (edit. by Schwartz, A.), 1, 479 (Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York, 1971).
Ungar, G., in Symposium on Protein Metabolism in the Nervous System, chapter 29 (edit. by Lajtha, A.), 571 (Plenum, New York, 1970).
McGaugh, J. L., Science, 153, 1351 (1966).
Ungar, G., Table 2.3 in “Bioassays for the Chemical Correlates of Acquired Information”, in Chemical Transfer of Learned Information, North-Holland Research Monograph, Frontiers of Biology (edit. by Fjerdingstad, E. J.), 22, 36 (North-Holland Publishing Co., Amsterdam, 1971).
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GOLDSTEIN, A. Comments on the “Isolation, Identification and Synthesis of a Specific-behaviour-inducing Brain Peptide”. Nature 242, 60–62 (1973). https://doi.org/10.1038/242060a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/242060a0
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