Aging and Neural Ensembles in the Perirhinal Cortex

描述(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性焦点。虽然这是合理的，但与海马体广泛相连的口周皮质的变化在多大程度上导致与年龄相关的行为缺陷尚不清楚。海马体受损的人失去了形成新记忆的能力，而大脑周围皮质受损的人则患上了语义性痴呆，这种情况的特征是语义知识潜伏地逐渐崩溃。因此，虽然海马体对形成新的记忆至关重要，但海马体周围皮质可能完整地参与了为这些记忆提供内容的过程。在正常衰老过程中，周围神经元的反应特性是否改变，和/或周围可塑性是否下降，从而导致记忆损伤，这是本方案所要解决的主要问题。为了解决这一问题，我们将使用电生理记录和成像神经系综用荧光原位杂交对时间活动的细胞室进行分析，以研究成年和老年大鼠的周围功能和再认记忆机制。

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