Aging and Neural Ensembles in the Perirhinal Cortex

描述（由申请人提供）：在过去的几十年中，海马体一直是年龄相关记忆衰退的经验焦点。虽然这是合理的，但在多大程度上的变化，在嗅周皮层，一个区域广泛与海马体，有助于与年龄相关的行为缺陷是未知的。海马损伤的人失去了形成新记忆的能力，而嗅周皮层损伤的人发展为语义性痴呆，这是一种以语义知识的隐性和逐渐崩溃为特征的疾病。因此，虽然海马体对于形成新的记忆至关重要，但边缘皮层可能整体参与了为这些记忆提供内容的过程。在正常衰老过程中，是否嗅周神经元的反应特性发生变化，和/或嗅周可塑性下降，导致记忆障碍，是本研究提出的主要问题。为了开始解决这一问题，将使用电生理记录和成像神经系综，通过荧光原位杂交对时间活动进行细胞室分析，研究成年和老年大鼠的嗅周功能和识别记忆的机制

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