Cellular Basis of Learning in the Mammalian Cortex: Role of Postsynaptic Glutamate Receptors

神经系统学习和记忆的能力最终取决于突触强度的变化，突触是单个神经细胞之间的连接点。大多数关于记忆形成的研究都集中在记忆编码过程中的早期时间点，这是突触强度变化首次被诱导的时候。因此，人们对生物体一生中记忆的保存机制知之甚少。利用多学科方法研究啮齿动物嗅觉识别学习的分子基础，可以克服这一障碍。嗅觉是老鼠的主要感觉方式，老鼠很快学会将气味与奖励联系起来。嗅觉辨别是一种强大的动物学习范式，它导致梨状皮质中大量突触的激活，从而为结合行为、电生理和生化方法来研究学习的细胞机制提供了宝贵的机会。嗅觉辨别学习将被用来检验梨状皮质突触在学习后变得不那么“可塑性”的假设。拟议的实验合并了两个实验室在非常不同的地理/政治环境中的研究工作。据预测，从这些实验中收集到的数据具有广泛的读者群，并将有助于在行为神经科学、突触生理学、分子和细胞生物学等领域之间建立桥梁。此外，它将把研究注意力集中在记忆过程的一个非常重要的方面，记忆保留，这是以前被忽视的。

The ability of the nervous system to learn and remember ultimately depends on the changes in the strength of synapses, the points of contact between individual nerve cells. The majority of research on memory formation has focused on early time points during the encoding of a memory, when the change in synaptic strength is first induced. Therefore, little is known about the mechanisms by which memories are retained over the lifetime of an organism. This obstacle can be overcome by using a multi-disciplinary approach to studying the molecular basis of olfactory discrimination learning in rodents. Olfaction is the primary sensory modality in the rat, and rats quickly learn to associate odor with reward. Olfactory discrimination is a robust animal learning paradigm that results in activation of a large population of synapses in the piriform cortex, thereby offering an invaluable opportunity to combine behavioral, electrophysiological and biochemical methods to study the cellular mechanisms of learning. Olfactory discrimniation learning will be used to test the hypothesis that synapses in the piriform cortex become less "plastic" after learning. The proposed experiments merge the research efforts of two laboratories in very different geographical/political environments. It is predicted that the data gleaned from these experiments have a wide readership, and will help to build bridges between the fields of behavioral neuroscience, synaptic physiology, molecular and cell biology. In addition it will focus research attention on a very important aspect of memory processes, memory retention, which has been previously ignored.