Boosting weakened synapses to treat Alzheimer’s disease

Abstract

This paper highlights a recent report by Roy and colleagues showing that boosting plasticity in synapses activated during initial memory encoding ameliorates memory impairments found in the early stages of the familial version of Alzheimer's disease. Our goal was to describe the main features of the report and evaluate the approach and implications of the work.

The Emergent Engram: A Historical Legacy and Contemporary Discovery

“…Although the conceptual strength of optogenetics and other cell “capture techniques” is the precise localization of the sparse network of neurons that make up an isolated engram (see Figure 1 ), the physical representation of a complex episodic engram is much more likely the emergent property of interactive memory systems (Tulving, 1987 ; Nyberg et al, 1998 ; McDonald et al, 2004a , b , 2017 ). Other technical problems of optogenetics may be considered, such as off-target effects in downstream circuits, as well as other spatial and temporal factors (Otchy et al, 2015 ; Südhof, 2015 ; Yates, 2016 ; Hardt and Nadel, 2017 ; McDonald and Deibel, 2017 ). For example, the specificity of a few neurons active in one area seems to mimic an in vitro -like isolation approach, while the snapshot-like association specificity in learning limits the unfolding of an event over time.…”