New-born brain cells improve people's orientation

The human body continues to produce brain cells throughout life - it is an undisputed fact. But until now, the purpose of this production is still a controversial topic in the scientific world. Now, the international team has taken a big step in understanding what role postpartum brain cells actually play. The new study, published in Science today, explains how young neurons help improve the ability to orient the environment.

'We believe that newborn brain cells help people distinguish memories from space,' said Dr. Fred H. Gage, a lecturer at the Salk Institute Genome Laboratory, senior author of the study. . Collaborating with him in the study were scientists: Dr. Timothy J. Bussey, senior lecturer at the University of Cambridge's Department of Experimental Psychology, and Dr. Roger A. Barker, honorary consultant on neurology at Adddenbrookes Hospital, Cambridge University faculty.

When the first clues show that adult brains continue to produce new neurons, the theory is strongly supported in previous neuroscience - in which the whole human life carries only the brain cells of the brain. The sutra available at birth - is almost completely denied. Although it is not easy to change a widely accepted principle, but after a decade, people have fully accepted that humans have more neurons in their development , and sentences. The only question being concerned is what role these new born cells take on.

'Creating more neurons can be a very complicated process if they do not integrate well into the existing neuronal system,' Gage said. 'There must be some obvious benefit to compensate for this risk.'

The region that produces the most new neurons is located in the mollusc region, a small area shaped like seahorses located deep inside the brain. It has the function of processing and organizing memory data into reasonable storage areas after the information is ready to be easily recalled later.

'Every day we have countless experiences related to time, emotions, plans, and many other dimensions,' explains Gage. 'All information comes from the cerebral cortex and is transferred to the codebase. There, they are 'bundled' together before moving back to the cortex - a long-term storage.

Previous studies conducted by several laboratories, including the Gage group, show that new neurons in one way or another will contribute to a process of acquisition and memory independent of the process in the code area. fish, but the specific function of these neurons remains an open question.

The serrated coil is the first 'relay station' in the cod region for information coming from the cortex. While moving through, the signals are broken down and allocated 10 times the number of cells. This process is called 'sample division', which plays a role in helping the brain divide individual events into similar groups of memories. 'Because serrated coils are also the place where later neurons are born, we initially thought that creating new neurons would aid in the process of sample division,' Gage said.

This hypothesis allows Claire Clelland, a graduate student, to design experiments to specifically test this function of jagged coils with the use of different action tasks and two separate strategies that turn off produces new neurons in the serrated coil.

In the first series of experiments, the right mouse learns the position of a food reward in the same position as the previous reward in a radiant maze with 8 outputs.'Mice that do not produce more neurons are more likely to find a new location if the two sites are far apart,' Clelland said, 'but they cannot distinguish two positions if they are close to each other. . '

An experiment using a touch screen confirmed the lack of capacity in mice lacking extra neurons while distinguishing between positions located close to each other. But overall, these mice have no difficulty in recalling spatial information.

"New neuronal births help us distinguish better and play a specific role in spatial memory formation," Clelland said, adding that 'Information on the relationship between Individual events have a certain value, and the closer they are to each other, the more important the information becomes. '

But the process of sample division is probably not the only function of new neurons: a computer model that simulates the movement around the neural folds of neurons based on all biological information. suggests that these neurons have another function. 'We were surprised to find that it turns out that newborn neurons actually form a path between individual elements that appear close together in a series,' Gage said.

Currently, he and his team are planning to conduct experiments to test whether newborn neurons play an important role in coding relationships in space and time. .

The study also recognizes the contributions of scientists: M. Choi, A. Fragniere, and P. Tyers from the Brain Recovery Center of Cambridge University; C. Romberg and L. M Saksida from the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge; graduate student G. Dane Clemenson Jr. from Gen Laboratory, Salk Biological Research Institute; and S ebastian Jessberger from the Institute of Cell Biology, Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Switzerland.