ABSTRACT

CaMKII and long-term potentiation (LTP) were discovered within a decade of each other and have been inextricably intertwined ever since. Francis Crick proposed that a memory molecule should possess two properties. First, it should be a multimeric protein with identical subunits that can phosphorylate each other. Second, to address how memories outlast molecular turnover he proposed that naïve unphosphorylated subunits could exchange into the phosphorylated multimer and become phosphorylated. In my talk I will demonstrate that autophosphorylation of CaMKII, indeed, maintains LTP (memory) by the synaptic capture of AMPA receptors and that this memory survives the protein turnover of CaMKII.

SELECTED PAPERS

1. Nicoll RA. A Brief History of Long-Term Potentiation. Neuron. 2017 Jan 18;93(2): 281-290.

2. Tao W, Lee J, Chen X, Díaz-Alonso J, Zhou J, Pleasure S, Nicoll RA. Synaptic memory requires CaMKII. Elife. 2021 Dec 15;10: e60360.

3. Chen X, Cai Q, Zhou J, Pleasure SJ, Schulman H, Zhang M, Nicoll RA. CaMKII autophosphorylation is the only enzymatic event required for synaptic memory. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2024 Jun 25;121(26): e2402783121.