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Protein Clumps Like a Prion, But Proves Crucial For Long-term Memory

from Science News

Sea slugs make memories with a twist. Screwing a normal nerve cell protein into a distorted shape helps slugs, and possibly people, lock in memories, new research shows.

Notably, the shape change also brings a shift in the protein's behavior, leading it to form clumps. That kind of behavior is the sort seen in prions, the misshapen, infectious proteins that cause mad cow disease, scrapie and other disorders. But the new study, published February 5 in Cell, shows a possible normal function for the shape-shifting, suggesting that twists and clumps don't necessarily make prions monsters.

In one sense, prions are machines of "molecular memory," says Yury Chernoff, a biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and editor in chief of the journal Prion. The proteins remember what happened to them--changing shapes--and then transmit that change to other proteins. "But the notion of these machines being used for cellular, and therefore organismal, memory is truly amazing," he says.