Mg2+ Block of Drosophila

By T. Miyashita, Y. Oda, J. Horiuchi, J. Yin, T. Morimoto, M. Saitoe. 2012

104 citations recorded by the source corpus.

SUMMARY NMDA receptor (NMDAR) channels allow Ca2+ influx only during correlated activation of both pre- and postsynaptic cells; a Mg2+ block mechanism suppresses NMDAR activity when the postsynaptic cell is inactive. Although the importance of NMDARs in associative learning and long-term memory (LTM) formation has been demonstrated, the role of Mg2+ block in these processes remains unclear. Using transgenic flies expressing NMDARs defective for Mg2+ block, we found that Mg2+ block mutants are defective for LTM formation but not associative learning. We demonstrate that LTM-dependent increases in expression of synaptic genes, including homer, staufen, and activin, are abolished in flies expressing Mg2+ block defective NMDARs. Furthermore, we show that genetic and pharmacological reduction of Mg2+ block significantly increases expression of a CREB repressor isoform. Our results suggest that Mg2+ block of NMDARs functions to suppress basal expression of a CREB repressor, thus permitting CREB-dependent gene expression upon LTM induction.

Subfields: Cell Biology, Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Mushroom body output neurons encode valence and guide memory-based action selection in Drosophila (2014, positive): “In this regard, we note that previous studies demonstrated a role for NMDA receptors in olfactory memory (Wu et al., 2007; Miyashita et al., 2012).”
Cell Type-Specific Transcriptome Analysis in the Drosophila Mushroom Body Reveals Memory-Related Changes in Gene Expression (2016, unknown): “…for identifying genes involved in memory formation in Drosophila include microarray studies on whole brains following the induction of LTM (Dubnau et al., 2003) or examining the downstream targets of the memory-related transcription factor CREB (Chen et al., 2012; Miyashita et al., 2012).”
Molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease (2020, unknown): “In Drosophila melanogaster, Aβ and tau coexpression increases tau phosphorylation and enhances neurodegenerative alterations induced by Aβ [309].”
Modelling learning and memory in Drosophila to understand Intellectual Disabilities. (2020, unknown): “In Drosophila, a single Homer homolog has been identified, which is predominantly upregulated during longterm memory after spaced training (Miyashita et al., 2012).”
Spaced Training Forms Complementary Long-Term Memories of Opposite Valence in Drosophila (2019, background): “…mutant for the radish (rad) gene have been reported to specifically lack aversive ARM, whereas pharmacological and genetic blockers of new transcription and protein synthesis only disrupt LTM (Tully et al., 1994; Yin et al., 1994; Dubnau et al., 2003; Chen et al., 2012; Miyashita et al., 2012).”
Glutamate is an inhibitory neurotransmitter in the Drosophila olfactory system (2013, unknown): “Fly stocks were published as follows: OK371-Gal4 (II) (1), UAS-CD8:GFP (II and III) (2), pebbledGal4 (X) (3), UAS-nsyb:GFP (4), GH146-Gal4 (II) (5), UAS-P2X2 (III) (6), NP3056-Gal4 (III) (7), UAS-GluClα RNAi (II) (8, 9), UAS-dicer2 (X) (8).”