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Behavioural neuroscience

Down memory lane

Nature volume 447, pages 151–152 (2007)Cite this article

In mice, two treatments — environmental enrichment and a chemical that regulates gene expression — boost new memory formation and restore the recall of old memories that seemed to have been lost.

If a pill were available that could boost your memory, would you take it? Odds are, most of us would say yes. What if that pill could improve the memory recall of someone suffering from a neurodegenerative disorder — would you get it for them? Almost certainly, yes again. Fascinating work by Fischer et al.1, described on page 178, indicates potential new enzyme targets — histone deacetylases — for developing such a pill Footnote 1. The authors provide a convincing proof-of-principle demonstrating that the inhibition of histone deacetylases can improve memory capabilities in a genetically engineered mouse model of neurodegeneration in the central nervous system (CNS).

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Figure 1: Histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors and memory restoration.

Notes

  1. This article and the paper concerned1 were published online on 29 April 2007.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. J. David Sweatt is in the Department of Neurobiology and McKnight Brain Institute, University of Alabama, Birmingham, 1825 University Boulevard SHEL 1010, Birmingham, Alabama 35294–2182, USA. dsweatt@nrc.uab.edu,

    J. David Sweatt

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  1. J. David Sweatt
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Sweatt, J. Down memory lane. Nature 447, 151–152 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature05716

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