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Scientists Identify Genes Activated During Learning And Memory
Researchers have theorized that certain genes must be activated to alter neuron activity inside the brain for learning and memory to take place. Finding and cataloging all the genes involved in learning is a formidable job. Scientists have now developed a computational approach to provide a rapid way to identify the likely members of this sought-after set of genes.
I hope to see results from this development in the coming years.
I for one am not surprised one bit it took them this many years considering the percentage of the human population who would be able to activate these genes regularly enough for them to be noticeable.
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This just in... genes used for human memory are used to discover themselves.
They didn't identify the genes... they developed a method that might help in identifying these genes.
Sigs are for the weak.
So I can like artificially stimulate my brain to like learn Kung-Fu in an instant? Or why not this silly exam on third world ideologies...
Don't be crazy anymore!
... but I do hope no-one's looking forward to some sort of treatment which would drastically improve our memory, except maybe as a way to diminish symptoms of Alzheimer's or similar diseases.
Much as I've always wanted a btter memory, studies conducted on the few people with truly eidetic memory showed that while they indeed had nearly perfect recollection, they also lacked the ability to discriminate between important and unimportant, though I still have my doubts as to what is the cause of which.
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It's not a big surprise that genes fire during the learning process. There's gotta be something happening chemically, otherwise none of the drugs that actually help would. Do they actually know which genes do what, as far as the learning is concerned? Or is this just a 'hey, let's formally announce this so it looks like we're making progress' type of thing?
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
If they monitor their own genes on the computer, will they learn which genes activate? And thus by learning activate them...
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This may yet still be years off, but this sort of thing could lead to the development of drugs that enhance the ability to learn in a temporary fashion. That is, you are able to remember everything you read in the few hours the drug is in effect, but once the drug wears off you keep the memories of what you learned while on it without having a permanent eidetic memory (believe me, that could drive you insane.)
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Okay, I read TFA and I'm a bit curious how this works, having no idea how neuroscience lab work is conducted. They say that they use a computer to test how the factors, CREB and ZIF something react with specific genes. How is this done?
On the one hand pinpointing all the genes involved in memory will undoubtedly help towards finding cures for the myriad of memory related disorders. Hooray!
On the other hand I can't help but feel like unlocking the secrets of the mind will inevitably lead to the obsolescence of the everyday human. Granted, we're still a long way off from creating super smart people with the flick of a switch but one day it will happen. We've already seen the creation of super strong rats and the like (too lazy to find links). The brain is quite complex however and chances are some mad scientists somewhere are bound to created a more than a few scrambled melons before striking success.
With each new discovery of the human genome we inch closer to fully understanding it. Once we have a complete grasp there are bound to be those who wish to further the species with "unnatural means". I would argue that we would only be speeding what would otherwise take thousands of years to take place (although there are certainly no guarantees we'll ever get much smarter as a whole). If survival of the fittest is the name of the game, and why would we not want further generations to be the best they can be? I suppose that can be answered by any number of sci-fi flicks, but Hollywood seems to paint a grim picture of genetically modified people as if they automatically become evil, or at least have the chance of snapping and turning evil at any moment. I see no reason we can't eventually re-create the likes of a Da Vinci. The only problem is that this type of work doesn't benefit an individual because he would be contributing to his own demise, the end of "natural" humans. If something that at least somewhat looks/acts/feels like a human makes it off this planet and onto other worlds I'd be happy knowing we lived on in at least some form.
Not to rain on anyone's parade here but this is pretty routine stuff. Basically, transcription factors bind to a gene's promoter region (the 'control' points) and control the production of protein from the gene. If you know that a certain transcription factor is involved in regulating some process (like learning) and you know some genes that the transcription factor regulates, you can look for sequence similarities (similar characters) in the promoter regions of those genes and then look for similar sequence in other genes to find other genes that the transcription factor _might_ control. Simplest algorithms that do this just use regular expressions while more sophisticated ones use a probabilistic model. But the results from these algorithms are not perfect (or close) because transcription factors really bind to specific 3D shapes and sequences of genetic characters are just a simple proxy for the real 3D shape (which we can't easily calculate and which depend on many other factors).
Anyway, according to the article, the work was done by an undergraduate student and it probably was good research but nothing news worthy. These kinds of press releases don't really do anyone (not the author, the scientific community nor the reader) any justice.
Well, seriously now, just the thought of any kind of brain-enhancing medicine makes me worry. How long until some dumbass parents stuff their kids full of such medicine, in the name of giving them a future?
I know my parents, for all the other good and (plenty of) bad things they did, pretty much buried me alive in extra homework. I'm not even sure it was as much for a future as such, as because in the circle of mom's and dad's equally nerdy friends they could brag about my achievements. I even pretty much ended up teaching dad physics so he can brag that he taught me. How's that for a stupid way to get your childhood stolen?
But at least thankfully no chemicals were involved. If such medicine existed, would I have been pretty much pickled in it?
Plus, much as I despise the western world aversion to learning in high school, in this scenario I'd worry more about the parts of the world that do take school seriously. E.g., most of Asia. After one guy starts taking this kind of stuff, how long until half the class gets marinated in it? You know, just so their grades don't look any worse. Little Tanaka is getting all A+, why can't you? Time to start giving you medicine each morning before school.
And if someone wants to say, "so what? It just makes them finally learn something in school"... how about the side-effects? E.g., how about remembering clearly and in detail, for the rest of your life, each time the school bully humiliated you? That's a scary thought.
What about later? With the drive since the 90's to find a way to write programs with cheap, summarily re-trained ex-burger-flippers instead of expensive nerds, how long until this kind of stuff becomes almost mandatory at work? Hey, think of how much the company could save if you don't keep forgetting (and having to rediscover) what each piece of the code does. How long until you have to drink the kool-aid before getting any training, or before each meeting? Hey, they're discussing important stuff there. (E.g., the boss's vacation.) You can't go and forget everything after a couple of hours. Or immediately, due to the wonderful effect of crap Powerpoint presentations.
It's not even as much wild guesses or slippery slope: it already happened in sports. The reason for forbidding steroids and other doping isn't only because one guy might get an undeserved medal, but because it creates a pressure for everyone to do the same. Once Mr X wins a medal based on being pickled in chemicals, then everyone else gets told by their trainer/manager/whatever, "you start drinking this stuff, or I'm finding someone else who does."
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This is not experimental article. . This is 100% computational study. And again (I said it elsewhere several times already): it would be nice if submitters will make a little bit of extra effort and give a link to the original peer-revied publication.
/.? No.
Worth publishing in a scientific journal? May be. Worth the front page of
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I fail to see what makes this article front page material. For starters CREB is a transcription factor that has implications in much more functions that neuronal ones (its just researched a lot in that context). It responds to cAMP concentrations which is a widely used secondary messenger in cellular information flow. Its present in many organisms ranging from slugs to humans.
A novel way of finding genes that might be regulated by CREB, the article doesnt discribe the exact algoritm but this isnt exactly new either: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_alignment#M
Screening the genome for possible locations of these CREB responsive genes, is that new? Nope not exactly: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/102/12/4
"Genome-wide analysis of cAMP-response element binding protein occupancy, phosphorylation, and target gene activation in human tissues" (received for review January 14, 2005)
Im not saying that CREB isnt involved in long term memory (which it is), but this approach seems an inappropriate way to tackle the problem, I can see the false positives piling up since CREB is implemented in general cellular survival pathways and a whole plethora of other systems. So it certainly isnt THE answer to brain function. Id really like to see that people would finaly abandon the outdated 1 to 1 gene phenotype/function view that sparks many of those populistic articles
If you really want to conceptually tackle the problem of how brain and memory works, youd better take a look at epigenetics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics
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It could lead to the development of drugs that reduce the ability to learn temporarily. Make it airborne, put it in a spray bottle - MIB, anyone?
That's just sick and ... what? Oh. Oh! "Learning". Sorry. I read it "Leering".
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Sounds quite neat, I'd go into this field maybe if I was starting over again.. or maybe not. Unfortunately it also makes a number of horror and terror plots spring to mind including enough for a bookshelf of novels and finally a reason why people shouldn't bring viral vector laden liquid onto planes (besides their own blood). WMD just got a lot cheaper..
I was under the impression that most people had great memories, just lousy retreival systems. We remember the dramatic things and the important things in part becasue those things are linked to something else - like other important facts or strong emotions.
While this research is fantastic and will surely result in breakthoughs to help people who cannot store information, I'm pretty sure it won't help me remember my father-in-law's birthday.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
"Where's my revision timetable, Lister? It's Saturday night. No one works Saturday night. You don't work any night. You don't work any day. Skive hard, play hard, that's our motto. Lister, where did you put my revision timetable. It's Saturday night. No one works Saturday night. You don't work..."
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So they've come up with a theory to test the proposal that would give a clue as to what....umm, what were talking about again?
Carnegie Mellon's media people seem to have done a very good job of publicizing some fairly routine work. Database searches to identify targets of transcription factors are fairly routine. The authors may have an improved approach, but the paper contains no experimental validation. And while there is plenty of evidence implicating these transcription factors in learning and memory, it does not necessarily follow that every gene regulated by these factors is involved in learning and memory. There are other transcription factors, both positive and negative, and transcription factors can interact in complex combinatorial ways.
Original Carnegie Mellon press release: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2007/April/april17 _genes.shtml
... but not worth a press release or getting excited about.
The actual journal article: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2202/8/20
This is not simply a proposal, though you have to go to the actual journal article to determine that. The press release is so hyped up though that it's hard to see that basically all they're doing is applying two well-known bioinformatics techniques to the problem of finding previously unknown/unstudied genes related to learning and memory.
The first technique is simply to see what interacts with known genes (CREB and zif268); since proteins function by interacting with each other, you'd expect that most - not all - of the proteins that CREB and zif268 interact with will be related to memory and learning. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_interaction
The second technique is just an application of the fact that similar proteins from different organisms (i.e. homologs) usually have the same function. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homology_modeling
These computational techniques can be very useful in hypothesizing which genes may be involved, so that you can then go to the lab and either confirm or reject your hypothesis. The authors did not do so, but they did do a search of the experimental literature, which gives a partial confirmation. But the fact remains that this work is simply the application of known computational techniques. In all, I'd say it's a nice bit of work and worth my time (as a PhD student with an emphasis in bioinformatics)
anyone have any opinions how this fits together with the new angelman research sumarised at http://www.huliq.com/10255/angelman-syndrome-defic its-rescued-in-mice
thanks