Early calcium increase triggers the formation of olfactory long-term memory in honeybees
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BioMed Central
Open Access
Research article
Early calcium increase triggers the formation of olfactory long-term memory in honeybees Emmanuel Perisse1,2, Valérie Raymond-Delpech1,3, Isabelle Néant2,3, Yukihisa Matsumoto1, Catherine Leclerc2,3, Marc Moreau2,3 and JeanChristophe Sandoz*1,3 Address: 1Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale (CRCA), Université de Toulouse, CNRS, Toulouse, France , 2Centre de Biologie de Développement (CBD), Université de Toulouse, CNRS, Toulouse, France and 3GDR 2688 'Role of calcium in gene expression in normal and pathological conditions' Email: Emmanuel Perisse - [email protected]; Valérie Raymond-Delpech - [email protected]; Isabelle Néant - [email protected]; Yukihisa Matsumoto - [email protected]; Catherine Leclerc - [email protected]; Marc Moreau - [email protected]; JeanChristophe Sandoz* - [email protected] * Corresponding author
Published: 16 June 2009 BMC Biology 2009, 7:30
doi:10.1186/1741-7007-7-30
Received: 27 January 2009 Accepted: 16 June 2009
This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/7/30 © 2009 Perisse et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract Background: Synaptic plasticity associated with an important wave of gene transcription and protein synthesis underlies long-term memory processes. Calcium (Ca2+) plays an important role in a variety of neuronal functions and indirect evidence suggests that it may be involved in synaptic plasticity and in the regulation of gene expression correlated to long-term memory formation. The aim of this study was to determine whether Ca2+ is necessary and sufficient for inducing long-term memory formation. A suitable model to address this question is the Pavlovian appetitive conditioning of the proboscis extension reflex in the honeybee Apis mellifera, in which animals learn to associate an odor with a sucrose reward. Results: By modulating the intracellular Ca2+ concentration ([Ca2+]i) in the brain, we show that: (i) blocking [Ca2+]i increase during multiple-trial conditioning selectively impairs long-term memory performance; (ii) conversely, increasing [Ca2+]i during single-trial conditioning triggers long-term memory formation; and finally, (iii) as was the case for long-term memory produced by multipletrial conditioning, enhancement of long-term memory performance induced by a [Ca2+]i increase depends on de novo protein synthesis. Conclusion: Altogether our data suggest that during olfactory conditioning Ca2+ is both a necessary and a sufficient signal for the formation of protein-dependent long-term memory. Ca2+ therefore appears to act as a switch between short- and long-term storage of learned information.
Background Activity-dependent modifications of synaptic strength are thought to form a basis for the neuronal changes that are
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