Publications related to Epigenetics in learning and memory

Face your fears: attenuating remote fear memories by reconsolidation-updating

Traumatic events generate some of the most enduring memories, yet little is known about how long-lasting fear memories can be attenuated. In this review, we collect the surprisingly sparse evidence on remote fear memory attenuation from both animal and hum ...

ELSEVIER SCIENCE LONDON2023

Plasticity of sensory representations in the posterior insular cortex during fear learning

Denys Osypenko

Aversively-motivated associative learning allows animals to avoid harm and thus ensures survival. Aversive learning can be studied by the fear learning paradigm, in which an innocuous sensory stimulus like a tone (conditioned stimulus, CS), acquires a nega ...

EPFL2023

A striatal circuit balances learned fear in the presence and absence of sensory cues

Ralf Schneggenburger, Olexiy Kochubey, Michael Kintscher

During fear learning, defensive behaviors like freezing need to be finely balanced in the presence or absence of threat-predicting cues (conditioned stimulus, CS). Nevertheless, the circuits underlying such balancing are largely unknown. Here, we investiga ...

eLIFE SCIENCES PUBL LTD2023

Hypothalamic pregnenolone mediates recognition memory in the context of metabolic disorders

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Ioannis Zalachoras, Sara Ramirez Flores

Obesity and type 2 diabetes are associated with cognitive dysfunction. Because the hypothalamus is implicated in energy balance control and memory disorders, we hypothesized that specific neurons in this brain region are at the interface of metabolism and ...

Cell Press2022

The HDAC inhibitor CI-994 acts as a molecular memory aid by facilitating synaptic and intracellular communication after learning

Johannes Gräff, Giulia Santoni, Allison Marie Burns, Jose Vicente Sanchez Mut

Long-term memory formation relies on synaptic plasticity, neuronal activity-dependent gene transcription, and epigenetic modifications. Multiple studies have shown that HDAC inhibitor (HDACi) treatments can enhance individual aspects of these processes and ...

2022

Epigenetic plasticity as a signature for memory allocation

Giulia Santoni

Long-lasting memories are stored in a small set of neurons scattered throughout the brain, so-called engram cells. To define a stable engram each region of the brain involved in memory storage recruits between 5 and 20 percent of excitatory neurons. In par ...

EPFL2022

Epigenetic memory aids: Synaptic and molecular effects of HDAC inhibition that support memory formation

Allison Marie Burns

Learning and memory rely on synaptic communication in which intracellular signals are transported to the nucleus to stimulate transcriptional activation. Memory induced transcriptional increases are accompanied by alterations to the epigenetic landscape an ...

EPFL2022

Brain-wide screen of prelimbic cortex inputs reveals a functional shift during early fear memory consolidation

Johannes Gräff, Lucie Pauline Dixsaut

Memory formation and storage rely on multiple interconnected brain areas, the contribution of which varies during memory consolidation. The medial prefrontal cortex, in particular the prelimbic cortex (PL), was traditionally found to be involved in remote ...

2022

Where does the engram come from? Study of prefrontal cortex inputs during memory consolidation

Lucie Pauline Dixsaut

The formation and storage of memories has been under deep investigation for several decades. Nevertheless, the precise contribution of each brain region involved in this process and the interplay between them across memory consolidation is still largely de ...

EPFL2022

Acquisition-dependent modulation of hippocampal neural cell adhesion molecules by associative motor learning

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez

It is widely accepted that some types of learning involve structural and functional changes of hippocampal synapses. Cell adhesion molecules neural cell adhesion molecule (NCAM), its polysialylated form polysialic acid to NCAM (PSA-NCAM), and L1 are promin ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2022

An insular cortex - lateral amygdala network in fear learning

Shriya Palchaudhuri

Animals are capable of evaluating sensory cues for possible threats and adapting their behaviours accordingly. Fear learning is an evolutionarily conserved behaviour crucial for animal survival, during which sensory percepts with a negative reinforcing qua ...

EPFL2022

Cortical sensory processing across motivational states during goal-directed behavior

Carl Petersen, Matthieu Pierre Auffret, Georgios Foustoukos, Sami El-Boustani, Johannes Maria Mayrhofer, Maëlle Guyoton

Behavioral states can influence performance of goal-directed sensorimotor tasks. Yet, it is unclear how altered neuronal sensory representations in these states relate to task performance and learning. We trained water-restricted mice in a two-whisker disc ...

2022

Genetic selection for low glucocorticoid responsiveness recapitulates PTSD-related phenotypes: a behavioral, neuroimaging and sleep-physiology study

Silvia Monari

Humans show inter-individual differences in vulnerability to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following exposure to trauma. Several critical biobehavioral features have been consistently described in PTSD patients, including blunted cortisol l ...

EPFL2022

Reduced NCOR2 expression accelerates androgen deprivation therapy failure in prostate cancer

Gerard Llimos Aubach

This study addresses the roles of nuclear receptor corepressor 2 (NCOR2) in prostate cancer (PC) progression in response to androgen deprivation therapy (ADT). Reduced NCOR2 expression significantly associates with shorter disease-free survival in patients ...

CELL PRESS2021

High throughput screening identifies SOX2 as a super pioneer factor that inhibits DNA methylation maintenance at its binding sites

Ludovica Vanzan

Binding of mammalian transcription factors (TFs) to regulatory regions is hindered by chromatin compaction and DNA methylation of their binding sites. Nevertheless, pioneer transcription factors (PFs), a distinct class of TFs, have the ability to access nu ...

Nature Research2021

Investigating Crosstalk Among PTMs Provides Novel Insight Into the Structural Basis Underlying the Differential Effects of Nt17 PTMs on Mutant Httex1 Aggregation

Hilal Lashuel, Matteo Dal Peraro, Luciano Andres Abriata, Lucien Fabrice Krapp, Anass Chiki, Driss Boudeffa, Iman Rostami, Rajasekhar Kolla, Zhidian Zhang

Post-translational modifications (PTMs) within the first 17 amino acids (Nt17) of the Huntingtin protein (Htt) have been shown to inhibit the aggregation and attenuate the toxicity of mutant Htt proteins in vitro and in various models of Huntington’s disea ...

2021

A dynamical systems approach to synaptic consolidation and associations of concepts in hippocampus

Chiara Gastaldi

In the present work, we approach two key aspects of memory formation: associative memory and synaptic consolidation. The storage of associative memory is commonly related to the medial temporal lobe in humans. Experimental evidence shows that the memories ...

EPFL2021

Single-Cell Tracing Dissects Regulation of Maintenance and Inheritance of Transcriptional Reinduction Memory

Sebastian Maerkl, Johannes Becker

Transcriptional memory of gene expression enables adaptation to repeated stimuli across many organisms. However, the regulation and heritability of transcriptional memory in single cells and through divisions remains poorly understood. Here, we combined mi ...

2020

Cognitive epigenetic priming: leveraging histone acetylation for memory amelioration

Johannes Gräff, Allison Marie Burns

Multiple studies have found that increasing histone acetylation by means of histone deacetylase inhibitor (HDACi) treatment can ameliorate memory and rescue cognitive impairments, but their mode of action is not fully understood. In particular, it is uncle ...

2020

Nucleosome Binding by the Lysine Specific Demethylase 1 (LSD1) Enzyme Enables Histone H3 Demethylation

Beat Fierz, Aurore Marie-France Delachat, Abhinav Dhall

The essential human enzyme lysine specific demethylase 1 (LSD1) silences genes by demethylating mono- and dimethylated lysine 4 in histone H3 (H3K4me1/2). Studies of the minimal requirements for LSD1 activity are complicated by the heterogeneity of histone ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2020