Guess who?s learning too!

ANGELES SALLES; MARIA DEL CARMEN KRAWCZYK; MARIANO BOCCIA; ARTURO ROMANO; RAMIRO FREUDENTHAL

Huerta Grande

Congreso; Congreso SAN 2014; 2014

SAN

NFkB activation has been shown to be necessary for long-term memory consolidation in the mouse inhibitory avoidance learning paradigm. NFkB is activated in the nucleus of hippocampal cells in a specific temporal window during consolidation. Previous results showed that the transcription factor is also present in the synapse and is activated at a different temporal window than in the nucleus during consolidation. In this paradigm mice are placed on an illuminated platform with an entrance to a dark compartment, the experimental group receives an electric shock when entering the dark compartment. Delay on entering the compartment is evaluated 48hrs later. The behavioural control group, are mice who experience the same context as the experimental group but do not receive an electric shock, 48hrs later this group of mice do not show a delay to enter the compartment. Nonetheless when analysing the activation of NFkB we found that this group of mice have elevated activation when comparing to naïve. This raised the questions of what was this change due to? What is hippocampus encoding for? is it the whole memory or just the context? We argue that this might be an appetitive learning situation for the mice, where they associate the context to a safe place and that this information may not be discriminated by the hippocampus. This work aims to discuss these results and the role of the hippocampus in learning of this task.