(from left to right) Hehuang “David” Xie, associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences and Pathobiology in the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine; Xiguang Xu, graduate student; Alexander Murray, graduate student. Photo credit: Alex Crookshanks.
Hehuang “David” Xie, associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences and Pathobiology in the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, and Center for Engineered Health faculty and his collaborators across several laboratories at Virginia Tech, are meticulously looking at two components, the transcription factor Egr1 and the TET1 enzyme, which hypothetically team up to help us learn new things and form long-term memory.
In their new study ,published in the journal Nature Communications, Xie and colleagues investigate the mechanisms of the Egr1-TET1 team-up in mouse brain frontal cortices, the primary brain region where learning is stored and where the brain is the slowest to mature.
In future the researchers hope to use this new information to learn more about long-term memory storage and the implications this may have for understanding Alzheimer’s disease and other disorders that result in memory loss.