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The original version from This story appeared in How much magazine.
When Todd sack gate It was about that his 4-year-old sister died of leukemia. “An empty bedroom next to me. A swing with two seats instead of one,” he said, remembering the continuing traces of their presence in the house. “There was this missing person – never spoken – because I only had a memory.” This memory, weak but permanent, was placed in the cave of her house on the ground floor. A young sack gate asked his sister to read a book and she wiped him: “Go and ask your mother.” Sack gate trudged the stairs to the kitchen foamy.
It is remarkable that the sack gate reminds of this fleeting moment of childhood more than 60 years later. The amazing nature of memory is that every memory is a physical trace that is printed by the molecular machinery of neurons into the brain tissue. How the essence of a lived moment is coded and called up later remains one of the central, unanswered questions in the neurosciences.
Sack gate became a neuroscientist to pursue an answer. At the State University of New York Downstate in Brooklyn, he examines the molecules that are involved in maintaining the neuronal connections on which the memory is based. The question that his attention always attracted was First articulated in 1984 Through the famous biologist Francis Crick: How can memories, even decades, when the body’s molecules deteriorate and be replaced within a few days, weeks or at most for months?
In 2024, a team worked with a team that included his long -standing employee André FentonSack gate, a neuroscientist at New York University Science progress. The researchers discovered this a persistent bond between two proteins is associated with the strengthening of synapses that are the connections between neurons. Synaptic strengthening is considered fundamental to memory formation. If these proteins worsen, new ones take their place in a connected molecular exchange that maintains the integrity of the bond and thus the memory.
The researchers present “a very convincing case” that “the interaction between these two molecules is required for storage storage” Karl Peter GieseA neurobiologist at King’s College London who was not involved in the work. The results offer a convincing reaction to cricks dilemma, in which the non -matching time scales are brought into harmony in order to explain how short -lived molecules keep memories that last for a lifetime.
Molecular memory
At the beginning of his career, Sacktor made a discovery that would influence the rest of his life. After studying under the molecular memory pioneer James Schwartz at Columbia University, he opened his own laboratory at Suny Downstate to look for a molecule that could explain how long-term memories remain.
The molecule he was looking for would be in the synapses of the brain. In 1949, the psychologist Donald Hebb proposed that the activation of neurons repeatedly strengthens the connections between them or, as the neurobiologist Carla Shats, later expressed it: “Cells that come together, wire together.” In the decades since then, many studies have pointed out that the more the connection between neurons, which keep memories, the better the memories exist.
In the early nineties, a slice of the hippocampus of a rat – a small region of the brain, which was associated with memories of events and places, stimulated in a dish in his laboratory, such as the interaction sack gate with his sister in the cave in order to imitate the memory and storage. Then he looked for molecular changes that had taken place. Every time he repeated the experiment, he saw increased mirrors of a certain protein within the synapses. “For the fourth time I thought it was,” he said.
