Affiliations and Partnerships
Marine Biological Laboratory
For more than a century, hundreds of distinguished scientists from around the world have gathered to conduct research at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), located in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Every summer MBL hosts the students from the best universities, the brightest young faculty, and the most successful scientists at the pinnacle of their profession. Many of the basic synaptic mechanisms controlling the nervous system that were later found to be involved in learning and memory were first characterized at the Laboratory.
MBL is the oldest private marine laboratory in the Western Hemisphere and is well suited for this type of research because its unique facilities are designed to allow the husbandry and rearing of marine models. Biologists value marine organisms because they serve as excellent models for understanding all living systems. They are often simple versions of more complex organisms. By studying life processes in marine animals, scientists learn how the same events occur in the human body —— and how those events are altered when disease strikes. BRNI Scientific Director, Dr. Daniel Alkon, M.D., was among the first to use a marine organism to study learning and memory.
Recently, during a year-long study, Dr. Alkon collaborated with researchers Dr. Alan Kuzirian and Dr. Herman Epstein from the MBL. Their research results suggest that bryostatin may stimulate the production of proteins in cells that are essential for long-term memory. Early Alzheimer's patients typically cannot store new long-term memories. Studies in mice and the marine snail, Hermissenda, show that bryostatin can promote the proteins required to construct permanent memory and biochemically enhance precisely this storage of long-term memory. The scientists exposed the marine snails to seawater containing bryostatin in the days leading up to memory tests. The research showed that memory could be enhanced in the snails if the animals were pre-treated with the drug.
Drs. Alkon, Epstein, and Kuzirian, continue to collaborate on Hermissenda research and are conducting additional learning and memory experiments using chemicals that may produce protein activation results similar to bryostatin.