Aging and Neural Ensembles in the Perirhinal Cortex

描述（由申请人提供）：在过去的几十年里，海马体一直是与年龄相关的记忆衰退的经验焦点。虽然这是合理的，但与海马体广泛联系的周围皮层的变化在多大程度上导致了与年龄相关的行为缺陷尚不清楚。海马体受损的人会失去形成新记忆的能力，而周围皮层受损的人会患上语义性痴呆，这种疾病的特征是语义知识的逐渐消失。因此，虽然海马体对形成新记忆至关重要，但周围皮层可能整体上参与了为这些记忆提供内容的过程。在正常衰老过程中，是否会改变周围神经细胞的反应特性，以及/或者周围神经细胞的可塑性是否会下降，从而导致记忆障碍，这是本研究提出的主要问题。为了解决这个问题，我们将利用电生理记录和成像神经系统以及荧光原位杂交的细胞区隔分析来研究成年和老年大鼠的鼻周功能和识别记忆机制

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): During the past several decades, the hippocampus has been an empirical focus of age-related memory decline. While this is justified, the extent to which changes in the perirhinal cortex, a region extensively interconnected with the hippocampus, contribute to age-related behavioral deficits is unknown. Humans with lesions of the hippocampus lose the ability to form new memories while humans with lesions of the perirhinal cortex develop semantic dementia, a condition characterized by an insidious and gradual breakdown in semantic knowledge. Thus, while the hippocampus is critical for forming new memories, the perirhinal cortex may be integrally involved in providing content to those memories. Whether the response properties of perirhinal neurons change, and/or there is a decline in perirhinal plasticity during normal aging that contributes to memory impairment, is the major question addressed in the present proposal. To begin to address this, perirhinal function and the mechanisms of recognition memory will be investigated in adult and aged rats using electrophysiological recordings and imaging neural ensembles with cellular compartmental analysis of temporal activity by fluorescence in situ hybridization