PBIO SEMINAR SERIES

Molecular mechanisms of hippocampal synaptic plasticity

Wednesday - February 28, 2007
06-07 Seminar Series

Yasunori Hayashi
Assistant Professor Picower Center. MIT
Speaker's website

Host: Andres Barria

Hippocampal long-term potentiation has been considered as a cellular counter-part of learning and memory and therefore attracted a great amount of interest. Various proteins in the synaptic compartment and their physical and biochemical interactions provide the mechanism maintaining and changing the strength of synaptic transmission. We have been studying this issue by combining molecular biology with both imaging and electrophysiology. In this seminar, I will first discuss about our recent data indicating that CaMKII, which has been considered as a cruicial component of signal transduction, is in fact a structural component in the dendritic spines that bundles F-actin. Then I will discuss about the second topic on the retrograde regulation of presynaptic release probability by cell adhesion molecules. Previously diffusible molecules such as NO or arachidonic acid have been suggested as candidates of retrograde modulator but our results implicate that cell adhesion can mediate such function.