The Molecular Mystery
There is still so much that is unknown about how the human brain stores memories at a molecular level. For example, take a song that you hear when you are a teenager, then don’t hear again for 40 years. One day, it comes on, and you immediately recognize it. How did that memory get stored and maintained for four decades?
For me, answering that kind of question is my goal. In the past, to help understand how memory works, I’ve done research looking at mice and worms. We’ve studied what changes take place on a cellular and molecular level as memories are formed. Our hope is that we’ll be able to learn more about the human brain and human nervous system by looking at how worms and mice form memories.
What we’ve learned so far is intriguing.
For example, we were able to show that the tiny C. elegans worm could form and retrieve short-term memories. In our experiment, worms normally liked the smell of almonds and moved toward a chemical with that scent. However, when the worms’ food was removed and the scent was present, they started showing an aversion to the smell and began moving away from it.
We figured out that the memory was stored in a single neuron in the worm’s nervous system, and that helped us pinpoint the exact molecules that store the memory.
It’s this type of work that we hope will explain how people can store information for long periods of time. Humans definitely have brains and nervous systems that are much more complex than those of mice or worms. Part of the most interesting part of our work is going back and forth between species, and seeing what translates, and what doesn’t.
Derek van der Kooy (PhD ’80) is a professor in Temerty Medicine’s Department of Molecular Genetics and the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research.