| Budget Amount *help |
¥26,520,000 (Direct Cost: ¥20,400,000、Indirect Cost: ¥6,120,000)
Fiscal Year 2014: ¥8,450,000 (Direct Cost: ¥6,500,000、Indirect Cost: ¥1,950,000)
Fiscal Year 2013: ¥12,350,000 (Direct Cost: ¥9,500,000、Indirect Cost: ¥2,850,000)
Fiscal Year 2012: ¥5,720,000 (Direct Cost: ¥4,400,000、Indirect Cost: ¥1,320,000)
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| Outline of Final Research Achievements |
Memories are changed dynamically over the course of time and by our daily experiences. To examine whether the original memory trace remains despite the disappearance of the behavioral expression of the memory, we performed pharmacogenetic neuronal activation using transgenic mice expressing hM3Dq DREADD (designer receptor exclusively activated by designer drug) under the control of the activity-dependent c-fos gene promoter. Neuronal ensembles activated during fear-conditioned learning were tagged with hM3Dq and subsequently reactivated after extinction training. The mice exhibited significant freezing, even when the memory is no longer triggered by external conditioned stimuli. The results suggest that some of the original fear memory trace are resistant to extinction, and such residual plasticity might reflect the persistent memory trace that is sufficient to evoke fear memory recall.
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