How Memories Are Made, and Lost

A protein that scientists once thought was a "piece of garbage in the brain" turns out to play a key role in memory formation. At high concentrations, however, it spells "the beginning of the end for memory."

Question: What is the goal of your research? 

Ottavio Arancio: 
Okay, the overall goal of the research in my lab is to find a
therapy
against the Alzheimer's disease. 
That's a very general way of saying things and to be more
specific we
are... we have different strategies in the lab to go to achieve this goal,
so we
are trying to approach it from different perspectives and if I have to
summarize these perspectives in a few words I should say that in one
kind of
studies we are trying to understand what is the function of a molecule
that is
called beta amyloid and this is a molecule made by many amino acids.  Once there are many amino acids
together those molecules are called peptides.  Anyway,
this beta amyloid, which is produced in a very high
amount in the brain of people with this disease and is known also to be
very
toxic to the communication of the cells in the brain and therefore to
lead to
memory impairment, so but we know that this molecule is present in the
brain of
people throughout life, just normal half the people and it is there in
very low
amount and nobody knew what was the function, if at all to any function
this
protein in this very low amount. 
What most of scientists thought was that it was kind of piece of
garbage
in the brain of people with no relevance whatsoever and instead we have
started
working on it and we have found that actually probably the very likely
function
of this protein in very low amount is just to be there to lead to normal
memory, so without it we cannot store information in the brain, we
cannot learn
and there will not be normal memory. 

So I mean with all the study what we think is that
this
molecule is there.  It's necessary
for memory and then for some unknown reason we start making...  people with the disease start making a lot
of it and the fact there is a lot just makes opposite of what it does in
the
normal brain, so it's actually it reduces memory when it is there in a
very
high amount and so this is a very, very you know interesting
characteristic and
we think that actually until the studies were not there what people were
doing
to understand the cause of the disease was just to look at the disease
from the
very end of it instead of trying to understand...  You
know it was a kind of a piece of a puzzle that is
missing to understand the... to understand how something which is there
becomes
what is the beginning of the end for memory.  So
in other words just to make things more simple because
otherwise we get lost here is that now we know that normal function of
this
protein in very low amount in the brain is to lead to memories, that
this
molecule is necessary for memory and that we now need to understand how
the
problem starts, how memory is impaired. 
We need to understand how this normal regulation of the level of
this
protein in the brain is broken and so the brain starts to make a lot of
it.  So we think that through this
study and through establishing what is normal function of the protein we
could
understand at the very beginning of the disease and once you usually
understand
how this starts, which is something which we really do not have it so
far.

Question: How does this
protein contribute to
memory loss?

Ottavio Arancio: What I found is that the normal function
of this protein is
there to lead to memory, the opposite of memory loss.  So
now I would like to understand the bridge between the
normal function of this protein, which is just to lead to memory to its
abnormal function, which is the memory loss.  You
see, so the fact that the protein gives to memory loss
is something that was already known by scientists.  It's
slightly different.  I don't want to take credit
of something I did not
discover.  What I have discovered
is that this protein in normal low concentration leads to memory.  It leads to memory loss the opposite
only when it is there in very high amount, and I would like to bridge
the gap
between its normal function and its pathological function, its bad
function.  How does a good turn
into a bad guy?  How does a good
protein turn into a bad protein?