Topic: actin-stabilizing protein

Learning resulting in long-term memory correlates with the formation of new dendritic spines. However, are these newly grown spines only a correlate or a necessity for long-term memory storage? The most direct way to answer this fundamental question is to build a tool to selectively eliminate newly formed dendritic spines, and to then apply this tool in vivo to observe whether a recently acquired long-term memory is destabilized.To this end, we have developed a chemical-genetic selective new spine elimination tool (NSET) in organotypic hippocampal slice cultures. This tool consists of two comp