Chapter category: Neuropharmacology
Acetylcholine: II. Nicotinic Receptors
From Messengers to Molecules: Memories Are Made of These
Edited by: Gernot Riedel and Bettina PlattISBN: 0-306-47862-5
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Chapter authors:
Joyce Besheer and Rick A. Bevins
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Cell Therapies for Muscular Dystrophy
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Destruction of muscle fibres accompanied by a reactive regenerative response is a major defining characteristic that distinguishes the muscular dystrophies from the more general category of myopathi...
Cell Adhesion Molecules
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The molecular cascade of events associated with hippocampal processing of information for long-term storage is a time-limited event. Learning sets in motion neural processes that continue to evolve ...
Eph Receptors and Their Ephrin Ligands in Neural Plasticity
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Eph receptor tyrosine kinases are largely known for their involvement in brain development. But, as these receptors are also expressed in the adult, their possible role in the mature nervous system ...
Aging and the Calcium Homeostasis
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Normal brain aging is associated with physiological alterations in Ca2+ homeostasis and deficits in learning and memory. The hippocampus, a structure critical for proper learning and memory function...
Animal and Human Amnesia: The Cholinergic Hypothesis Revisited
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The net effect of an experimentally-induced or “naturally” occurring alteration in learning and memory is generally determined by the type of neurological dysfunction (from focal lesions to gene exp...
Learning-Induced Synaptogenesis and Structural Synaptic Remodeling
Yuri Geinisman, Robert W. Berry and Olga T. Ganeshina
This chapter analyzes the results of quantitative electron microscopic studies of the vertebrate brain aimed at the elucidation of changes in synaptic unltrastructure that may underlie learning and ...
Protein Synthesis: II. New Proteins
Radmila Mileusnic
The role of protein synthesis in long-term memory formation is still an area of intense scientific interest, which encompasses the study of mechanisms involved in gene expression and molecular mecha...
Protein Synthesis: I. Pharmacology
Oliver Stork and Hans Welzl
The formation of long-lasting memory traces depends on the de novo synthesis of proteins. For more than 30 years substantial experimental evidence has been collected in species ranging from insects ...
CREB
Paul W. Frankland and Sheena A. Josselyn
The cAMP Responsive Element Binding Protein (CREB) is an activity regulated transcription factor that modulates the transcription of genes with cAMP responsive elements (CRE) located in their promot...
Nitric Oxide
Kiyofumi Yamada and Toshitaka Nabeshima
Among three isoforms of nitric oxide (NO) synthase, both neuronal and endothelial NO synthases may play an important role in learning and memory. NO production in the brain increases, in an activity...
MAP Kinases
Joel C. Selcher, Edwin J. Weeber and J. David Sweatt
In neurons the extracellular-signal-regulated kinases (ERKs) are emerging as important regulators of neuronal function. This chapter will discuss the great progress that has been made in identifying...
CaMKinase II
Martin Cammarota and Jorge H. Medina
The modification of synaptic properties by means of protein phosphorylation has been, for long, recognized as a core and unifying principle in the study of the molecular mechanisms underlying the fo...
Protein Kinase A
Monica R.M. Vianna and Ivan Izquierdo
Memories are believed to rely upon enduring morphologic and functional changes at synapses activated by learning events. Experiments carried out in the past two decades have indicated that several c...
Phospholipases and Oxidases
Christian Hoelscher
Memory formation is dependent on a series of biochemical cascades that alter synaptic transmission and neuronal activity. Phospholipases are key enzymes in these cascades that produce second messeng...
Corticosteroids
Carmen Sandi
Glucocorticoid hormones, released from the adrenal glands, easily access the brain where they can affect neural structure and function through the binding to two types of intracellular receptors, th...
Nerve Growth Factors and Neurotrophins
Catherine Brandner
Cell division, cell death, and cell differentiation are hallmarks of embryogenesis. Such processes are supported by neurotrophins that have the capacity of regulating not only developmental processe...
Neuropeptides
David De Wied and Gobor L. Kovacs
Neuropeptides are peptides involved in nervous system function. They are synthesized in cells in large precursor proteins, and generally several biologically active peptides are contained in the sam...
Cannabinoids
Lianne Robinson, Bettina Platt and Gernot Riedel
Despite its long tradition in human psychopharmacology, animal studies on the effect of marijuana and its constituents in memory formation are relatively recent. They have been aided by both the dev...
Adenosine and Purines
Trevor W. Stone, M-R. Nikbakht and E. Martin O’Kane
Adenosine can act on four subtypes of receptor, of which the A1 and A2A subtypes have received the most attention experimentally. The A1 receptors are primarily inhibitory by depressing transmitter ...
Adrenaline and Noradrenaline
Marie E. Gibbs and Roger J. Summers
Noradrenaline released in the brain can potentially act on any of 9 different receptor subtypes and since activation of the different receptors produces quite different effects both in duration and ...
Acetylcholine: II. Nicotinic Receptors
Joyce Besheer and Rick A. Bevins
The nicotinic cholinergic system has been widely implicated in mediating learning and/or memory processes in human and nonhuman animals. This chapter highlights various areas of basic research in wh...
Acetylcholine: I. Muscarinic Receptors
Giancarlo Pepeu and Maria Grazia Giovannini
The study of brain muscarinic receptors began more than a century ago, long before the existence of muscarinic receptors was postulated and then demonstrated. However, the effects of drugs acting on...
gamma-Amino-Butyric Acid (GABA)
Claudio Castellano, Vincenzo Cestari and Alessandro Ciamei
In this chapter studies are considered concerning the actions of GABAA and GABAB receptor agonists and antagonists on memory formation in laboratory animals. Peripheral posttraining administrations ...
Glutamate Receptors
Gernot Riedel, Jacques Micheau and Bettina Platt
Glutamate as a neurotransmitter plays a critical role in multiple processes in the brain from early development to ageing and includes important functions in memory formation. Both ionotropic and me...
Potassium
Jeffrey Vernon and Karl Peter Giese
Potassium-selective channels are ubiquitous constituents of plasma membranes, and are structurally and physiologically diverse. It is considered that their multiplicity of form allows for the fine-t...
Dopamine
Jan P.C. de Bruin
Since the discovery that dopamine occurs in the cerebral cortex and functions as a trans mitter a large number of studies has been conducted to examine its precise functions. It was found that admi...
Opioids
Makoto Ukai, Ken Kanematsu, Tsutomu Kameyama, and Takayoshi Mamiya
To date, numerous publications have reported on the effects of opioids in learning and memory, and much research has been conducted on novel opioid receptor ligands as anti-amnesic drugs. The involve...
Calcium
Miao-Kun Sun and Daniel L. Alkon
Ca2+ plays an essential role in a variety of intracellular signaling cascades, which under- lie mechanisms essential for the dynamic control of cell functions. In cognition, Ca2+ participates in ...
Phosphatases
Pauleen C. Bennett and Kim T. Ng
Evidence implicating protein serine/threonine phosphorylation in memory formation and related brain processes continues to accumulate at a rapid rate. Several protein kinases have been demonstrated to...
Protein Kinase C
Xavier Noguès, Alessia Pascale, Jacques Micheau and Fiorenzo Battaini
This chapter reviews the involvement of PKC in cognition and in the brain pathologies affecting cognition. PKC is a family of enzymes. Its activation process is described in the first part. In t...
Serotonin
Marie-Christine Buhot, Mathieu Wolff and Louis Segu
The serotonergic system is widely distributed in the central nervous system and plays a role in many behavioral and physiological processes. However, converging data indi cate that serotonin (5-H...
Immediate-Early Genes
Jeffrey Greenwood, Pauline Curtis, Barbara Logan, Wickliffe Abraham and Mike Dragunow
How long-term memories are formed in the brain is one of the principal targets of contemporary neuroscience research. This work is important from a fundamental perspective, because memory is a v...
Histamine
Rüdiger U. Hasenöhrl and Joseph P. Huston
Histamine is an important but largely neglected modulator in the central nervous sys- tem. Histaminergic neurons are located exclusively in the posterior hypothalamus, the tuberomammillary nucleu...
Adenylyl Cyclases
Nicole Mons and Jean-Louis Guillou
Although a number of signal transduction pathways have been implicated in short- and long-term adaptative changes in neuronal plasticity and memory formation, there is increasing evidence that c...
