Investigação do padrão de expressão da CaMKII após o aprendizado na tarefa de reconhecimento de objetos

Abstract

Memory is a complex and vital phenomenon for human and animal cognition, allowing the retention and retrieval of information essential for learning and decision-making. The mental experience of memory is subjective and, therefore, it is not possible to evaluate it directly in non-human species, so tasks that employ animal models, such as object recognition task, can be used. This model is widely studied to evaluate declarative memories, which are the most affected in degenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's Disease - AD. Studies indicate that the hippocampal system plays a key role during recognition memory processing. Ca2+ homeostasis appears to be imbalanced in AD, leading to marked cognitive impairment. Intracellular levels of Ca2+ ions regulate some proteins that play a key role in mnemonic processing, such as CaMKII, which is particularly enriched in the hippocampus and located in the postsynaptic density. Therefore, isolation and quantification of synaptic proteins is a necessary and useful technique to obtain information about the ways in which neurons respond to stimuli and alter synaptic efficacy. Our work showed that our synaptic isolation protocol generates a crude synaptosomal fraction enriched in postsynaptic density proteins; and that through the use of this fraction we observed an increase in the expression of the phosphorylated isoform, pCaMKII Thr286, shortly after training in the object recognition task.