Presenter(s): Brynna Paros
Faculty Mentor(s): Michael Wehr & Jonathan Saunders
Poster 64
Session: Sciences
Long-term memories are thought to be encoded by synapses, but synaptic proteins recycle within days. Roger Tsien hypothesized that Perineuronal Nets (PNNs) could provide a durable “punch card” for memory storage. PNNs are tightly-regulated protein lattices surrounding some neurons that inhibit new, while maintaining existing synapses. Understanding speech requires learning the low-level acoustic features of a language, which becomes difficult or impossible after a developmental sensitive period. Do PNNs preserve the acoustic features learned during infancy and inhibit learning new sound categories? Our preliminary experiments demonstrated that the enzymatic digestion of PNNs in auditory cortex enabled mice to learn a distinction between english phonemes (/b/ and /g/) that they were previously unable to. We will present these and other pilot data investigating the effect of PNN digestion on the rate of phonetic acquisition. If PNNs serve as a scaffolding to preserve learned low-level sensory representations, they would be an entirely unexplored therapeutic target for children or elderly people with sensory processing impairments, as well as provide a promising new explanation for the mechanistic origin of developmentally sensitive or critical periods.