Berçem Ayhan

ID:240104048
OPTOGENETIC AND MEMORY

Optogenetics is a novel technology that has an impact on cells in brain by using light and
thus it can manage the neural activity and can control behaviour by controling spatial and
temporal control of cells. This technology was required long time ago. In 1979 Francis Crick
mentioned the struggle in neuroscience studies that in experiments specific cells can not be
targeted without affecting other cells.
Optogenetic stimulation requires a specific protein called opsins however this protein has to
injected into brain and one way of this is infect with virus to carry the opsin gene into the
brain, particularly to the cell of interest of a mammal or make transgenic animal that can
express opsin in its brain.
Hypothesis: study LTP in hippocampus and change neural activity by Optogenetics, and
analyze behavioral changes
In our experiment we investigate the optogenetic for memory(particularly increase the
synaptic strengty)
Hippocampus is important in episodic memory. We decide to look at neural connections in
hippocampus by optogenetic technique and to try increase synaptic strength and thus
increase long term potention(LTP).
Firstly we examine the major excitatory neural components of the hippocampus and the
cellular mechanism
Information comes from entorhinal cortex and goes through perforant pathway onto the
granule cells of the dentate gyrus with excitatory inputs then, mossy fibers will get the action
potential and project them to CA3 region and there it will synapse with CA3 pyramidal
neurons Then they will project at CA1 region and synapse with pyramidal neurons there,
Schaffer collaterals connects the CA1 and CA3 pyramidal neurons .
In our experiment we use Lenti and adeno-associated virus (AAV) to insert
channelrhodopsin-2 into neurons in perforant pathway in BALB-c(mice) and the light is
delivered in the brain by LED device coupled to a thin optical fiber and when blue lights
shining on neurons on perforant pathway it stimulates the action by depolarizing neurons and
it is resulted in a long-term increase in the magnitude of excitatory postsynaptic potential and
led to greater synaptic strength in the perforant pathway which cause postsynaptic responses
resulted in the granule cells of the dentate gyrus.
In this experiment our expectation is to increase LTP and see a improvement in learning and
memory.
Male and female BALB-c were trained in the morris water maze separetly to evaluate
learning and long term memory
Mice put in pool have blurry water and is 6 feet in diameter and about 3 feet deep and mice
escape platform is placed in the center of the pool. An animal behavior tracking system the
SMART (San Diego Instruments) was used to monitor the path, After 2 minutes, animal gets
tired and stops trying, and put on platform. After 12 trials, platform is removed from the
pool. The animal was released starting from the north. The number of times the animal
crosses the center of the pool during the  30 seconds was recorded.
The same test was done on control group.
According to results, time

Escape latency gets shorter as days pass but significantly escape latency was much shorter
in female mice and male mice than control group and female mice show better improvement
than male mice