Seems mostly conclusive. PKMz affect anything else?

Very interesting.

“Even older memories could be wiped out: When the researchers waited 30 days after training before injecting the inhibitor, the rats' month-old memories vanished.”

Now for some wild speculation…

Target this drug to the sites that are activated by a specific memory and you erase the memory. What a tool for brainwashing! Stimulate the memory, flood the activated synapses with the drug, rinse, and repeat. Or modify the drug to act when simultaneously presented with a molecular signal of synaptic stimulation together with an external radiowave signal. Simultaneously stimulate the memory and send the signal and the memory is gone. Do it all under computer control and process a population. Big Brother could really make a person completely disappear.

Combine this “forgetting” technology with a drug that super-enhanced learning and religions could wage conversion wars.

PKMz affect anything else?
dunno.. there is a paper looking at the expression patterns of PKC isoforms that says Zeta has highly specific profile.. also, the function is conserved since drosophila version acts similarly. interestingly, drosophila seem to maybe have two parallel memory systems (anaesthesia-sensitive and -resistant) and zeta works in the resistant portion along with a gene called radish.. unfortunately this system is less well understood and mapped than the anesthesia-sensitive system..

actually i just looked over the developmental paper i was thinkin of and for the most part it ignores pkm zeta in favor of pkc zeta..

fly- it seems unlikely to me that people would understand the brain well enough to do what you suggested AND maintain a belief in a soul and religion and whatnot. also, whether this technique could be applied with any specificity is up for grabs..

Coffee Mug: “fly- it seems unlikely to me that people would understand the brain well enough to do what you suggested AND maintain a belief in a soul and religion and whatnot.”

Perhaps I should have said “cult”. I’m envisioning a runaway process in which a group gains access to the technology and uses it to gain more members. How could it be stopped?

This scenario isn’t that far fetched. Repair and rehabilitation of brain function after injury and disease will continue to advance. There is a medical need to erase traumatic memories. Cognitive psychology treatments are based on the idea of retraining destructive thought patterns. Following early medical applications, I’d expect interventions to cure rather than punish criminal behavior. Eventually the technology could be adapted for efficient education and personal self-development.

The capability to rebuild and retrain minds is disruptive.

ZIP is quite specific to reversing late-LTP. We showed in Serrano et al. and Frey's lab showed in Sajikumar et al. (both in J. Neuroscience) that it did not affect baseline synaptic transmission or reverse early LTP. We are currently looking at other types of behavioral memory (including the inhibitory avoidance used in the Bear study).

It's too early to say whether GluR1 phosphorylation is that important for the PKMzeta effect.

Note also that the Bear paper showed that even training had miniscule effects on field potential recordings in the hippocampus. This was consistent with our observation of no effect of ZIP on baseline field recordings. It may not be that surprising that caged animals have no or few novel events in their lives, the memories of which are worth preserving in the hippocampus. Thank you for reading our paper, Todd