Think about the objects you interact with in your day-to-day life, like your water bottle or your phone. These objects shape how we connect with each other and our environment, each interaction etched into our memory.
But how do we remember to interact with these objects? How does our brain form these memories? Dr. Mark Cembrowski and neuroscience PhD student Adrienne Kinman may have uncovered a crucial part of the puzzle.
In a study published in Nature Communications on February 12, the pair, along with other researchers in the UBC Faculty of Medicine, discovered a new type of brain cell called ovoid cells — these cells play a key role in our ability to recognize and remember objects.
“Recognition memory is a cornerstone of our day-to-day life. It's central for survival,” said Cembrowski, the study’s principal investigator and associate professor of cellular and physiological sciences at the UBC faculty of medicine in an interview with The Ubyssey.
The research team looked at mouse brain cells from the subiculum — a region of the brain next to the hippocampus. After running sequencing experiments over several months, they discovered a group of neurons that “stuck out like a sore thumb,” with unique gene expression and a distinctive ovoid or circular cell-body shape.
Historically, it was widely believed that the hippocampus — the part of the brain that is responsible for our memory and learning — contained only a single type of cell called 'pyramidal cells' that could fulfill a variety of functions.
“It was just thought that [pyramidal] cells were really flexible and they could do all of these different things,” said Kinman, the study’s first author. “[Our research] is counteracting that and saying, ‘Actually, maybe there is something underlying them that [makes] them more discrete.’”
The study discovered that ovoid cells differed from pyramidal cells in their gene expression, shape, connectivity and very specific function.
“What was really quite cool about this study is that once we were able to identify that these ovoid cells existed, and they've been sort of hiding in plain sight … basically every feature, every property of these cells, varies from textbook pyramidal cells of the hippocampus, and thus it's basically like a new layer of cells,” said Cembrowski.
“And [this] new layer of cells govern learning and memory in a really exquisite way.”
The researchers hope this discovery will pave the way for new treatment options for epilepsy and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
“We wanted to understand these cells in these clinical contexts,” said Cembrowski. ”Alzheimer's and epilepsy seem to be two leading clinical settings where, by understanding these cells, we may, in the long term, derive new therapeutic targets and treatments.”
“We found that [ovoid] cells were involved in encoding novelty,” said Kinman, referring to the brain’s process of encoding new information into memory.
“False novelty, for example, is something that is seen in … animal models of Alzheimer's disease, and also in clinical populations,” said Kinman. “And so in theory, in the future we could look at ways of targeting these cells to maybe alleviate these things."
Similarly, in the case of epilepsy, the researchers believe these cells could help with therapeutic treatment in the short term.
“So [in] some of our experiments in the mouse brain, we saw that these cells are what we would call hyper-excitable, or a little bit of input would cause these cells to fire a lot,” said Cembrowski.
Increased hyper-excitability may lead to runaway excitations, where brain network activity is uncontrolled and persists without external input or inhibition, and can cause seizures.
“By understanding these cells and the molecules that are within these cells, that can potentially give us targets by which we can take this over hyper-excitability and begin to reduce it and prevent these seizures from occurring,” said Cembrowski.
The researchers are hopeful that this discovery will open new research opportunities into the neural components of memory and object recognition memory.
“Learning and memory, these things really make us who we are,” said Dr. Cembrowski. “And to my mind, understanding these neural components of memory, this is like the Holy Grail of neuroscience.”
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