• HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
Monday, June 16, 2025
BIOENGINEER.ORG
No Result
View All Result
  • Login
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
No Result
View All Result
Bioengineer.org
No Result
View All Result
Home NEWS Science News Neuroscience

The brain’s ‘inner GPS’ gets dismantled

Bioengineer by Bioengineer
November 11, 2014
in Neuroscience
Reading Time: 2 mins read
0
ADVERTISEMENT
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on LinkedinShare on RedditShare on Telegram

Imagine being able to recognize your car as your own but never being able to remember where you parked it. Researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have induced this all-too-common human experience – or a close version of it – permanently in rats and from what is observed perhaps derive clues about why strokes and Alzheimer’s disease can destroy a person’s sense of direction.

brain

Photo credits: Robert Clark

The findings are published online in the current issue of Cell Reports.

Grid cells and other specialized nerve cells in the brain, known as “place cells,” comprise the brain’s inner GPS, the discovery of which earned British-American and Norwegian scientists this year’s Nobel Prize for medicine.

In research that builds upon the Nobel Prize-winning science, UC San Diego scientists have developed a micro-surgical procedure that makes it possible to remove the area of the rat’s brain that contains grid cells and show what happens to this hard-wired navigational system when these grid cells are wiped out.

One effect, not surprisingly, is that the rats become very poor at tasks requiring internal map-making skills, such as remembering the location of a resting platform in a water maze test.

“Their loss of spatial memory formation was not a surprise,” said senior co-author Robert Clark, PhD, a professor of psychiatry. “It’s what would be expected based on the physiological characteristics of that area of the brain,” which is known as the entorhinal cortex and is the first brain region to break down in Alzheimer’s disease.

But the rats retained a host of other memory and navigation-related skills that scientists had previously speculated would be destroyed without grid cells.

“The surprise is the discovery of the type of memory formation that was not disrupted by the removal of the grid cell area,” Clark said.

Specifically, UC San Diego scientists were able to show that even without grid cells rats could still mark spatial changes in their environment. They could, for example, notice when an object in a familiar environment was moved a few inches and they could recognize objects, such as a coffee mug or flower vase, and remember later that they had seen these objects before.

Electrical recordings of signals transmitted from the hippocampus suggested that the animals had developed place cells – cells that are believed to convey a sense of location – and that these cells were firing when an animal passed through a familiar place.

“Their place cells were less precise and less stable, but they were present and active,” said Clark, who is also a research scientist at Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System. “That was a surprise because we had removed the spatially modulated grid-cell input to these neurons.”

The axons of grid cells project into the hippocampus and it has been assumed that without this relay of information from the entorhinal cortex to the hippocampus, place cells would be unable to develop. “This is not the case,” he said.

“Our work shows a crisp division of labor within memory circuits of the brain,” he said. “Removing the grid-cell network removes memory for places but leaves completely intact a whole host of other important memory abilities like recognition memory and memory of fearful events.”

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by University of California – San Diego, Scott LaFee.

Share12Tweet8Share2ShareShareShare2

Related Posts

blank

Redox biomarker could predict progression of epilepsy

October 5, 2016
blank

Neural membrane’s structural instability may trigger multiple sclerosis

October 5, 2016

Scientists find new path in brain to ease depression

October 5, 2016

Key players responsible for learning and memory formation uncovered

October 3, 2016
Please login to join discussion

POPULAR NEWS

  • Green brake lights in the front could reduce accidents

    Study from TU Graz Reveals Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates

    159 shares
    Share 64 Tweet 40
  • New Study Uncovers Unexpected Side Effects of High-Dose Radiation Therapy

    75 shares
    Share 30 Tweet 19
  • Pancreatic Cancer Vaccines Eradicate Disease in Preclinical Studies

    69 shares
    Share 28 Tweet 17
  • How Scientists Unraveled the Mystery Behind the Gigantic Size of Extinct Ground Sloths—and What Led to Their Demise

    65 shares
    Share 26 Tweet 16

About

We bring you the latest biotechnology news from best research centers and universities around the world. Check our website.

Follow us

Recent News

MOVEO Project Launched in Málaga to Revolutionize Mobility Solutions Across Europe

Nerve Fiber Changes in Parkinson’s and Atypical Parkinsonism

Magnetic Soft Millirobot Enables Simultaneous Locomotion, Sensing

  • Contact Us

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
No Result
View All Result
  • Homepages
    • Home Page 1
    • Home Page 2
  • News
  • National
  • Business
  • Health
  • Lifestyle
  • Science

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.