Original version With This story appeared in How much warehouse.
When Todd Sactor He was 3 3 years vintage, his 4-year-old sister died of leukemia. “Empty bedroom next to my. A set of swings with two seats instead of one,” he said, remembering lasting traces of her presence at home. “There was this missing person,” she never talked about it, “I had one memory to.” This memory, frail but hard-wearing, was set at the bottom of their house. The newborn Sactor asked his sister to read him the book, and she rejected him: “Go ask his mother.” Sacktor died gloomily up the stairs to the kitchen.
It is amazing that more than 60 years later Sactor remembers this fleeting moment of childhood. The amazing nature of memory is that every memory is a physical trace, printed to the brain tissue by the molecular machinery of neurons. The method of encoding the essence of the moment he experienced, and then recovery remains one of the central questions unanswered in neuronaouka.
Sactor has become a neuronauk in the pursuit of answers. At the State University of Modern York Downstate in Brooklyn, he studies molecules involved in maintaining neuronal connections underlying memory. The question that always caught his attention sounded first articulated in 1984 By the celebrated biologist Francis Crick: How can memories last for years, even decades, when the body molecules degrade and are replaced within a few days, weeks or at most a month?
In 2024 André FentonNeurobiologist at Modern York University, Sactor presented a potential explanation in an article published in Scientific progress. Scientists discovered this permanent binding between two proteins It involves the strengthening of synaps, which are connections between neurons. It is believed that synaptic strengthening is of fundamental importance for memory creation. When these proteins degrade, novel ones occupy their place in a combined molecular exchange, which maintains the integrity of binding, and therefore memory.
Scientists present “a very convincing case” that “interaction between these two molecules is needed to store memory,” he said Karl Peter GieseNeurobiologist from King’s College London, who was not involved in work. Discoveries constitute a convincing response to the Crick dilemma, reconciliation of incompatible time scales in order to explain how ephemeral molecules maintain memories that last throughout their lives.
Molecular memory
At the beginning of his career, Sactor made a discovery that shapes the rest of his life. After studying under the pioneer of the molecular memory of James Schwartz from Columbia University, he opened his own laboratory in Suny Downate to look for a molecule that can support explain how long -term memories persist.
The molecule he was looking for would be in the synapses of the brain. In 1949, psychologist Donald Hebb suggested that neurons that repeatedly activate the connections between them or, like neurobiologist, Carla Shatz later arranged it: “Cells that fire together, combine.” Over the past decades, many studies suggested that the stronger the relationship between neurons that keep memories, the better memories remain.
In the early 1990s, in a vessel in his laboratory, the Sacktor stimulated a piece of the Hippochamp of a rat – a diminutive region of the brain associated with memories of events and places, such as the sacctor of impact with his sister in is – to activate neural routes in a way that imitated memory coding and storage. Then he sought all molecular changes. Every time he repeated the experiment, he saw elevated levels of a certain protein in synapses. “For the fourth time I was so that that’s all,” he said.