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.
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.