Image of the Day: Fountain of Youth

Neural plasticity wanes with age, but increasing the protein Arc—abundant earlier in life—in the visual cortex of mice can fend off this decline.

Written byThe Scientist
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An artificially colored immunofluorescence image depicting labeled Arc protein (green) within the visual cortex of a transgenic mouse engineered to overexpress the Arc gene following exposure to light.ELISSA PASTUZYNArtificially increasing Arc through transgenic overexpression in engineered mice or via viral vectors later in life can prolong and re-establish, respectively, brain plasticity in the visual cortex.

See K.R. Jenks et al., “Arc restores juvenile plasticity in adult mouse visual cortex,” PNAS, doi:10.1073/pnas.1700866114, 2017.

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