@article{24, keywords = {Animals, Humans, Mutation, Aging, Caenorhabditis elegans, Caenorhabditis elegans Proteins, Insulin, Receptor, Insulin, Insulin-Like Growth Factor I, Signal Transduction, Animal Feed, Association Learning, Behavior, Animal, Chemotaxis, Cyclic AMP Response Element-Binding Protein, Learning, Memory, Receptors, Nicotinic}, author = {Amanda Kauffman and Jasmine Ashraf and M Ryan Corces-Zimmerman and Jessica Landis and Coleen Murphy}, title = {Insulin signaling and dietary restriction differentially influence the decline of learning and memory with age.}, abstract = {

Of all the age-related declines, memory loss is one of the most devastating. While conditions that increase longevity have been identified, the effects of these longevity-promoting factors on learning and memory are unknown. Here we show that the C. elegans Insulin/IGF-1 receptor mutant daf-2 improves memory performance early in adulthood and maintains learning ability better with age but, surprisingly, demonstrates no extension in long-term memory with age. By contrast, eat-2 mutants, a model of Dietary Restriction (DR), exhibit impaired long-term memory in young adulthood but maintain this level of memory longer with age. We find that crh-1, the C. elegans homolog of the CREB transcription factor, is required for long-term associative memory, but not for learning or short-term memory. The expression of crh-1 declines with age and differs in the longevity mutants, and CREB expression and activity correlate with memory performance. Our results suggest that specific longevity treatments have acute and long-term effects on cognitive functions that decline with age through their regulation of rate-limiting genes required for learning and memory.

}, year = {2010}, journal = {PLoS Biol}, volume = {8}, pages = {e1000372}, month = {2010 May 18}, issn = {1545-7885}, doi = {10.1371/journal.pbio.1000372}, language = {eng}, }