Investigate the Molecular Mechanism of How Pi3k/Akt Is Involved in Memory Formation and Its Relation to Camp/Pka Pathway

In order to cope with explosive external information our brain encountered everyday and to prevent information overloading, our brain has developed a strategy to efficiently manage the new information. Recent studies on the storage for acquired information suggested there are two-way processes, active forgetting and consolidation, for brain to conclude the fate of memory. However, in terms of acquisition or encoding, it is not known whether there are also two-way processes to allow brain to evaluate the external stimulation to decide how much information is needed for further processing. For the sake of energy, the existence of this analysis process is better for brain to utilize resource wisely. Our preliminary results suggested that paired-classical-conditioning induces PI3K/Akt activation, which offers a negative signal for brain to reduce the ability to acquire the new information. This negative signal, PI3K/Akt pathway, competes with well-known activity-induced cAMP/PKA activation, a positive signal, to decide how much new information is acquired. We hypothesize that training-induced PI3K/Akt and cAMP/PKA activations interacts each other within a brain and are important for learning and memory formation. This proposed grant is designed to investigate how PI3K/Akt is activated after training and what is the molecular and cellular mechanism involved in the interaction between PI3K/Akt and cAMP/PKA. We believe these two signals work together to manage the learning and memory formation. We also believe results of this research grant will open a new window to explore the mechanism behind the formation of learning and memory.