Scientists find brain proteins associated with memory loss in the elderly

A low level of brain protein called rbap48 may cause memory loss in the elderly, according to a new study These findings support the view that age-related memory loss is a different condition from Alzheimer's disease and suggest that therapies designed to increase the protein content may be beneficial to older people with memory problems In the brain, rbap48 is usually attached to a protein called a histone in the shape of a spool, and DNA just surrounds and tightly wraps the histone so that it can be contained in the nucleus However, genes cannot be activated in such a compact structure because the factors required for activation cannot be contacted with genes Rbap48 can help histones release their binding to DNA, enabling genes to be expressed Elias pavlopoulos and his colleagues found that rbap48 protein can specifically coordinate gene expression related to neuron function and memory formation The researchers obtained eight brains from the human brain bank at Columbia University in New York - both young and old These brains come from people who choose to donate their brains for research after death Zoom in to the hippocampus, the area of the brain where memories form, and pavlopoulos and colleagues found 17 genes that don't work properly in the brain of the elderly, compared to the brain of the young These genes are specifically located in the dentate gyrus, a small boomerang shaped region that is crammed into the hippocampus Among these 17 genes, the most seriously affected gene is rbap48 The expression of the gene and the amount of rbap48 protein produced by the gene were reduced by almost 50% in the dentate gyrus of the aged human brain The researchers found that turning off the protein expression in young mice made them forgetful, while increasing it in old mice restored their memory These results suggest that rbap48 may play an important role in memory formation in dentate gyrus, and memory loss in the elderly may be due to the low content of this protein in the brain Further research is needed to reveal why aging can reduce the content of rbap48 in the brain, and to determine whether the protein can be the target of treatment in the brain.