PUBLICATION

Protein synthesis-dependent associative long-term memory in larval zebrafish

Authors
Hinz, F.I., Aizenberg, M., Tushev, G., and Schuman, E.M.
ID
ZDB-PUB-131024-23
Date
2013
Source
The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience   33(39): 15382-15387 (Journal)
Registered Authors
Schuman, Erin
Keywords
none
MeSH Terms
  • Animals
  • Conditioning, Classical/drug effects
  • Excitatory Amino Acid Antagonists/pharmacology*
  • Larva
  • Memory, Long-Term/drug effects*
  • Protein Biosynthesis
  • Protein Synthesis Inhibitors/pharmacology*
  • Receptors, N-Methyl-D-Aspartate/antagonists & inhibitors
  • Reward
  • Zebrafish
PubMed
24068805 Full text @ J. Neurosci.
Abstract

The larval zebrafish is a model organism to study the neural circuitry underlying behavior. There exist, however, few examples of robust long-term memory. Here we describe a simple, unrestrained associative place-conditioning paradigm. We show that visual access to a group of conspecifics has rewarding properties for 6- to 8-day-old larval zebrafish. We use this social reward as an unconditioned stimulus and pair it with a distinct visual environment. After training, larvae exhibited spatial preference for the location previously paired with the social reward for up to 36 h, indicating that zebrafish larvae can exhibit long-term associative memory. Furthermore, incubation with a protein synthesis inhibitor or an NMDAR-antagonist impaired memory. In future experiments, this learning paradigm could be used to study the social interactions of larval zebrafish or paired with cell-specific metabolic labeling to visualize circuits underlying memory formation.

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