Protein Synthesis-Dependent Associative Long-Term Memory in Larval Zebrafish
Abstract
The larval zebrafish is a model organism to study the neural circuitry underlying behavior. There exist, however, few examples of robust long-term memory. Here we describe a simple, unrestrained associative place-conditioning paradigm. We show that visual access to a group of conspecifics has rewarding properties for 6- to 8-day-old larval zebrafish. We use this social reward as an unconditioned stimulus and pair it with a distinct visual environment. After training, larvae exhibited spatial preference for the location previously paired with the social reward for up to 36 h, indicating that zebrafish larvae can exhibit long-term associative memory. Furthermore, incubation with a protein synthesis inhibitor or an NMDAR-antagonist impaired memory. In future experiments, this learning paradigm could be used to study the social interactions of larval zebrafish or paired with cell-specific metabolic labeling to visualize circuits underlying memory formation.
Additional Information
© 2013 the authors. Received Feb. 6, 2013; revised Aug. 9, 2013; accepted Aug. 10, 2013. Author contributions: F.I.H., M.A., and E.M.S. designed research; F.I.H. and M.A. performed research; G.T. contributed unpublished reagents/analytic tools; F.I.H. analyzed data; F.I.H. and E.M.S. wrote the paper. This work was supported by the Max Planck Society. We thank the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research workshop for their help in constructing the chambers and behavioral box and Dr. Susanne tom Dieck and Dr. Cyril Hanus for their helpful critique of the manuscript.Attached Files
Published - 15382.full.pdf
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Additional details
- PMCID
- PMC6618464
- Eprint ID
- 42037
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20131024-094939862
- Max Planck Society
- Created
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2013-10-24Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-10Created from EPrint's last_modified field