Active neurons in a zebrafish telencephalon.Adapted from AOKI ET AL.The transparent brains of zebrafish, in combination with a fluorescent protein expressed in the brain in response to neural activity, have allowed researchers to catch a glimpse of memory in action. The research, published today (May 16) in Neuron, pinpointed areas of the brain that play a role in storing long-term memories and provide a new tool to study the processes underlying memory formation, storage, and retrieval.
“It’s a wonderful paper,” said Robert Gerlai, a neuroscientist at the University of Toronto who was not involved in the research. The very fact that researchers were able to conclusively prove—in a vertebrate—that specific neuronal activation was due to a memory recall process is “huge,” he added.
Behavioral neuroscientists have struggled to understand the multistep processes involved in learning and memory, Gerlai explained. Evidence directly linking retrieval of a specific memory to a specific set of neurons has been lacking in mammalian brains, he said. Instead, researchers have relied on more indirect experiments, such as ablating specific brain areas and testing the impact on animals’ abilities to form or retrieve memories.
The transparency of zebrafish brain tissue makes the animals ideal models for studying neuronal ...
