SFN2010 Itinerary Pt. 1

I have 62 items in my itinerary and I expect to add to it in the following weeks. There are always great presentations I find out about last minute and undoubtedly others that never see the light of (my) day. So fill me in if you have any tips. It’s not always the data that’s the most interesting part but often the presenter themselves, their ideas, methods, or the fact that you’ve known them since undergrad and you want to see baby pictures. My plan here is to share some of the potentially (you never know til you’re there) interesting presentations in my itinerary, bit by bit, over the next couple weeks.

1) 99.8/JJJ44 – The hippocampus is required for social recognition but not object recognition in Octodon degus
*T. UEKITA1, K. OKANOYA2;
1Doshisha Univ., Kyotanabe City, Japan; 2RIKEN BSI, Lab. for Biolinguistics, Wako City, Japan

Huh? Octogon what? They’re rodents unlike any other rodent. They perform communal digging, nurse each other’s young, are born with their eyes open, and are intolerant of sugar and get diabetes. Even more interesting is the fact that they can switch their circadian rhythms between nocturnal or diurnal patterns and they’re apparently able to use tools (at least according to Wikipedia). So, basically I want to chat about Degus with these guys.

2) 100.19/KKK35 – Hippocampal granular neuron recruitment during the evocation of a recent or remote object recognition memory
P. C. BELLO-MEDINA1, *V. RAMIREZ-AMAYA2;
1Neurobiologia Conductual y Cognitiva, Inst. de Neurobiologia, Univ. Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Queretaro, Mexico; 2Neurobiologia Conductual y Cognitiva, Inst. de Neurobiologia UNAM, Queretaro, Mexico

Victor Ramirez-Amaya has done some interesting work on learning-related structural plasticity in the hippocampus and he’s also shown that the plasticity-related protein Arc is expressed in a delayed fashion after experience, probably as a part of the process of memory consolidation. Since there’s an emerging role for the dentate gyrus and neurogenesis in long-term memory I’m interested in this poster, which looks at activity-dependent Arc expression in the dentate gyrus and in young neurons after recent and remote(ish) memory retrieval.

3) 101.6/KKK46 – Spatial representation along the proximo- distal axis of CA1
*E. J. HENRIKSEN1, C. A. BARNES2,1, M. P. WITTER1, M.-B. MOSER1, E. I. MOSER1;
1Kavli Inst. Sys Neurosci, Ctr. Biol of Memory, NTNU, Trondheim, Norway; 2Univ. Arizona, NSMA, Tuscon, AZ

The hippocampus is a convenient structure to study because its anatomical boundaries are distinct – the dentate gyrus doesn’t abut any other principal cell layers. CA3 and CA1 are easily distinguished from each other based on cell packing density. Probably for this reason there has emerged the assumption that these subregions are homogeneous in function. However, at least for the dentate gyrus it has become clear that it’s two blades are very different. And now, this abstract reports that the CA1 neurons that border region CA3 carry more spatial information than those at the other end, near the subiculum. I’m not entirely sure why I’m interested in this, but it may be because it suggests a certain level of care must be taken in future experiments (e.g. being consistent in where measurements are made) and it argues for better reporting in methods sections as to how measurements were made (because we now know that not all areas of CA1 are equivalent).

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