Drosophila long-term memory formation involves regulation of cathepsin activity

Daniel Comas, Florian Petit and Thomas Preat ()
Additional contact information
Daniel Comas: Développement, Évolution et Plasticité du Système Nerveux, CNRS
Florian Petit: Développement, Évolution et Plasticité du Système Nerveux, CNRS
Thomas Preat: Développement, Évolution et Plasticité du Système Nerveux, CNRS

Nature, 2004, vol. 430, issue 6998, 460-463

Abstract: Abstract Whereas short-term memory lasts from minutes to hours, long-term memory (LTM) can last for days or even an entire lifetime. LTM generally forms after spaced repeated training sessions and involves the regulation of gene expression1,2, thereby implicating transcription factors in the initial steps of LTM establishment3. However, the direct participation of effector genes in memory formation has been rarely documented, and many of the mechanisms involved in LTM formation remain to be understood. Here we describe a Drosophila melanogaster mutant, crammer (cer), which shows a specific LTM defect. The cer gene encodes an inhibitor of a subfamily of cysteine proteinases, named cathepsins, some of which might be involved in human Alzheimer's disease4. The Cer peptide was found in the mushroom bodies (MBs), the Drosophila olfactory memory centre and in glial cells around the MBs. The overexpression of cer in glial cells but not in MB neurons induces a decrease in LTM, suggesting that Cer might have a role in glia and that the concentration of the Cer peptide is critical for LTM. In wild-type flies, cer expression transiently decreases after LTM conditioning, indicating that cysteine proteinases are activated early in LTM formation.

Date: 2004
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02726 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:430:y:2004:i:6998:d:10.1038_nature02726

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/nature02726

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().