Topic: auditory fear conditioning

Ketamine is a rapid-acting antidepressant often accompanied with different cognitive side effects. Previous research has generated mixed results regarding its effects on distinct types of memory. Here, we investigated the effects of an antidepressant dose (10 mg/kg) of ketamine on encoding, retrieval, and modulation processes in an implicit and an explicit memory task in adult male Wistar rats (n = 60). Ketamine (IP) was administered 30 minutes either before the acquisition, retrieval, or extinction phase of auditory fear conditioning (implicit task). Similarly, different groups of animals rec

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