A beautiful view of hundreds of different brain cells stained in bright colors

Discoveries

As The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory celebrates its 20th Anniversary in 2022, we take stock of highlights of our labs' contributions to neuroscience knowledge over that time. There are many more than could be listed here. Browse these areas of discovery to learn about what we've found during our first two decades of discovery and impact.

Emotions and Memory

An area of brain tissue mostly glows green but has a red patch in the middle

A molecular approach to autism

A boy in a yellow shirt plays witha toy in the foreground

40Hz rhythms fight Alzheimer’s at the cellular and molecular level

Adult dendritic plasticity

Six panels show neurons stained in green or red colors to inidicae the presence of GABA, an inhibitory neurotransmitter

Brain waves and cognition

Three bell curve shaped lines on a graph - one red, one blue and one black

Dopamine coordination of motor behaviors

A highly magnified nematode worm is shown in black and white overlaid by a blue line that traces its posture

Age effects of anesthesia

A horizontally oriented plot compares frequency vs. age using color warmth to indicate power. The warmer colors decline in height (frequency) with age.

Cortical mechanisms guiding perception, learning and action

On a black background there is a tangle of red and green stained neurons

A social distancing circuit

Microscope images show a blue-stained mouse brain. At the bottom on each side are cells shining white. A second panel shows higher magnification of that area

Importance to memory of replay and sleep

Four panels show figure eight shapes in mostly blue but areas of warmer colors on a white background.

How synapses change

In panels side by side, two twig-like neurons stained green stretch across a black background. The one on the right is the more branchy of the two.

Cell-type specific vulnerabilities in disease

CPG15 (“Neuritin”)

A grid of microscope snapshots shows dendritic spines appearing and disappearing over a 42-day period

Time and events in memory

Two panels show a stripe of warm colors running top left to bottom right through a blue background. The left one, labeled light off, is very tight and organized. The right one, labeled light on, is very diffuse and messy.

Breaking DNA in health and disease

Four panels in a 2 by 2 grid show cells stained in different colors to denote the presence of DNA double-stranded breaks

Engrams: mapping and manipulating memories

Two rows show saggital views of a mouses brain lit up in speckles of many different colors corresondeing to hundreds of brain regions. A scale shows that as colors become warmer, the regions were more likely to be involved in memory.

Plasticity and ‘metaplasticity’ in amblyopia

A cartoon of a man seen from overhead shows his brain with two eyes, yellow or green, sending flashes of input to the back of the brain

Immune molecule influences social behavior

On the left a cartoon mouse brain is labeled to denote the S1DZ region on the upper right. From there we see columns showing cells stained in various colors.

An elegant behavior switching circuit

A flowchart illustrates how several cells form a mutually inhibiting loop to allow for sensory inputs and internal states to output situationally appropriate behavior

CPG2

A thicket of blue vine like dendrites accented in red sprawls across a black background

Visual Recognition Memory

A blue coronal mouse brain section shows green highlighting in the visual cortex

‘Rewiring’ cortical circuits

A dendrite lit up yellow-green snakes from the lower left to the upper right

Life and death factors for neurons

A 2x2 grid of microscop images shows red speckles overlaid on blue blobs. The blue indicates cells. The red indicates aggregated proteins. Where a gene called NME has been knocked down, there are more red speckles on the cells.

Fruit fly models of human disease

Bright green glow outlines hundreds of cells in a microscope image of tissue

Mechanisms and therapeutics for Rett Syndrome

A series of columns in two rows tracks the trajectory of a few highlighted cells with colored lines trailing behind them. The lines behind the cells in the top row are straigther and more consistently red than the lines trailing behind the cells in the bottom row.

Roots of APOE4-related Alzheimer’s pathology

On a black backgorund long spiny cells glow brightly with blue centers and yellow bodies and thin protrusions

Neural representations of categories, rules and concepts

A series of bar charts in red (top) and bottom (blue) show that neurons reliably sorted objects into categories so long as they fit the right criteria, regardless of how thoroughly

Epigenetic loss and rescue of memory recall

Three vertical panels show bumpy neural branches. The degree of bumps differs from panel to paneland bumps are denoted by yellow arrows.

The machinery of neural communication

Bright green and bright blue dots line two lengths of a fly neuromuscular junction

Key roles for astrocytes

A slice of mouse visual cortex shows cells labeled in blue, red and green

Effects of general anesthetics on the brain

An array of eight horizontal heat map visualizations shows thick red stripes along the bottom of each. They otherwise bear no consistent similarity.

Silent Engrams: Distinctions between memory storage and recall

A hippocampal slice with green neurons representing a memory engram

Executive control by multifunctional neurons in the prefrontal cortex

Two side by side graphs with a number of squiggly lines in different colors essentially illustrate that a single neuron was simultaneiously representing information needed for two different categorization tasks

A link between autism and intestinal inflammation

A cartoon illustrates the physiological differences between pregnant mice and their offspring after infection.

Inhibitory synapse dynamics

In a square left panel we see a red neuron with sprawling red branches. In a vertical right panel we zoom in on a branch and see little yellow and white spots along its length

Arousal Control: Reanimation and Sleep

Two panels show a large blue area of brain tissue with a green stain in the middle. The green stain is enlarged ont he wright showing where an experimental injection occurred.

Hippocampus as an interregional memory hub

Four black panels show red-stained cells.

Genes & plasticity in memory

In four panels we see neurons on a black background stained in red, green or yellow colors.

Long-term potentiation in memory

A cartoon depicts a synapse using bulbous blue axon and dendrite projections nearly meeting on their ends