IFIBYNE   05513
INSTITUTO DE FISIOLOGIA, BIOLOGIA MOLECULAR Y NEUROCIENCIAS
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Comparison of an aversive and an appetitive conditioning in the crab: role of otopamine
Autor/es:
LAURA KACZER & HÉCTOR MALDONADO
Lugar:
Vancouver, Canada
Reunión:
Congreso; 8th International Congress of Neuroethology; 2007
Resumen:
Comparison of an aversive and an appetitive conditioning in the crab: role of octopamine Laura Kaczer, Héctor Maldonado University of Buenos Aires, Pabellón 2. Ciudad Universitaria, Capital Federal, Capital Federal 1428, Argentina; laurakaczer@hotmail.com An intriguing issue in the study of associative memories is to determine which compounds underlie these memory representations in the nervous system. Octopamine (OA) is a biogenic monoamine structurally related to noradrenaline that acts as a neurohormone neuromodulator and neurotransmitter in invertebrates. Results obtained in insects as the honeybee and the fruitfly have shown that OA would mediate the reinforcement in olfactory appetitive learnings. The objective of the present work is to study the role of OA in two associative memory paradigms in the crab Chasmagnathus granulatus: one aversive and one appetitive. The former is a memory process extensively characterized from a behavioral and a neurobiological point of view which implies an association between the learning context (conditioned stimulus CS) and a visual danger stimulus VDS (unconditioned stimulus US) and it is termed context-signal memory (CSM). We have demonstrated that OA is an amnesic agent of consolidation and reconsolidation when injected temporally close to the end of training and reactivation respectively. We are nowadays developing an appetitive learning paradigm and starting to address the effect of OA in this type of memory. We use the food as a positive reinforcement (US) and the same visual learning context (CS) as the one in the aversive paradigm with the addition of an olfactory cue (monosodium glutamate) as a potential enhancer of the context. By using these two conditioning paradigms we could explore the role of OA in diverse memory phases and in two opposite learning conditions.