A new study published in Nature Neuroscience presents DELTA, a method to track synaptic proteins throughout the brain, highlighting its pivotal role in understanding synaptic plasticity, crucial for learning and memory. Traditional methods struggled to identify where protein changes occur, but DELTA enables detailed monitoring of protein turnover at individual synapses. Researchers demonstrated through mouse studies that associative learning and environmental enrichment significantly increase the turnover of synaptic proteins, especially in the hippocampus, providing critical insights into the brain's adaptive mechanisms related to experience and memory formation.
While it's known that protein turnover - protein synthesis and protein degradation - at synapses plays a crucial role in these processes, existing analytical methods lacked the resolution to map and visualize these changes across the entire brain at the level of individual synapses.
Beyond learning tasks, environmental enrichment, such as cages with running wheels, more bedding and housing for example, led to widespread increases in synaptic protein turnover across multiple brain regions, suggesting that experience broadly influences synaptic dynamics.
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