Age‐related memory vulnerability to interfering stimuli is caused by gradual loss of MAPK‐dependent protection in Drosophila
By Han Mo, Linghan Wang, Yuting Chen, Xuchen Zhang, Ning Huang, Tingting Liu, Wantong Hu, Yi Zhong, Qian Li. 2022
8 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Age‐related memory impairment (AMI) is a common phenomenon across species. Vulnerability to interfering stimuli has been proposed to be an important cause of AMI. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying this vulnerability‐related AMI remain unknown. Here we show that learning‐activated MAPK signals are gradually lost with age, leading to vulnerability‐related AMI in Drosophila. Young flies (2‐ or 3‐day‐old) exhibited a significant increase in phosphorylated MAPK levels within 15 min after learning, whereas aged flies (25‐day‐old) did not. Compared to 3‐day‐old flies, significant 1 h memory impairments were observed in 15‐, 20‐, and 30‐day‐old flies, but not in 10‐day‐old flies. However, with post‐learning interfering stimuli such as cooling or electric stimuli, 10‐day‐old flies had worse memory performance at 1 h than 3‐day‐old flies, showing a premature AMI phenomenon. Increasing learning‐activated MAPK signals through acute transgene expression in mushroom body (MB) neurons restored physiological trace of 1 h memory in a pair of MB output neurons in aged flies. Decreasing such signals in young flies mimicked the impairment of 1 h memory trace in aged flies. Restoring learning‐activated MAPK signals in MB neurons in aged flies significantly suppressed AMI even with interfering stimuli. Thus, our data suggest that age‐related loss of learning‐activated neuronal MAPK signals causes memory vulnerability to interfering stimuli, thereby leading to AMI.
Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Endocrine and Autonomic Systems, Pharmacology
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Citations in the corpus
- Incorporating neuro-inspired adaptability for continual learning in artificial intelligence (2023, positive): “First, old memories are actively protected from new disruption by strengthening the previously learned synaptic changes 29,31 .”
- Genetic dissection of mutual interference between two consecutive learning tasks in Drosophila (2022, methodology): “To reduce content similarity between tasks, we changed the proactive task into nonassociative stimuli (Mo et al., 2022; Tully and Quinn, 1985; Zhang et al., 2018) or an appetitive learning task (Liu et al.”