Imbalance in cerebral protein homeostasis: Effects on memory consolidation

The long-standing hypothesis that memory consolidation is dependent upon de novo protein synthesis is based primarily on the amnestic effects of systemic administration of protein synthesis inhibitors (PSIs). Early experiments on mice showed that PSIs produced interference with memory consolidation that was dependent on the doses of PSIs, on the interval between drug injection and training, and, importantly, on the degree and duration of protein synthesis inhibition in the brain. Surprisingly, there is a conspicuous lack of information regarding the relationship between the duration of protein synthesis inhibition produced by PSIs and memory consolidation in the rat, one of the species most widely used to study memory processes. We found that, in the male rat, a single injection of cycloheximide, a commonly used PSI, produced a significant imbalance in protein homeostasis: an early inhibition of protein synthesis that lasted for at least one hour, followed by hyperproduction of proteins that lasted three days. We evaluated memory consolidation of inhibitory avoidance trained with either low or high intensity of foot-shock at the peaks of protein synthesis inhibition and protein hyperproduction. We found that, independent of the moment of training, the low-foot-shock groups showed amnesia, while the high-foot-shock groups displayed optimal memory performance. These results indicate that memory consolidation of relatively weak training is impaired by the inhibition or hyperproduction of protein synthesis, and that intense training overcomes this dysregulation of protein homeostasis allowing for memory formation probably through non-genomic mechanisms.