"Challenging behavior" in dementia care: ethical complications of a well-intentioned concept.

Uncommon behaviours such as aggression, apathy or restlessness are described as challenging behaviours in dementia care. On the one hand, this concept describes a practical problem faced by care staff and, at the same time, defines normatively how care staff should deal with this problem. A frequent benchmark here is the dignity of the person in need of care, which caregivers should also respect in the case of challenging behaviour.

Synaptotagmin-3 drives AMPA receptor endocytosis, depression of synapse strength, and forgetting.

Forgetting is important. Without it, the relative importance of acquired memories in a changing environment is lost. We discovered that synaptotagmin-3 (Syt3) localizes to postsynaptic endocytic zones and removes AMPA receptors from synaptic plasma membranes in response to stimulation.

SIFamide Translates Hunger Signals into Appetitive and Feeding Behavior in Drosophila.

Animal behavior is, on the one hand, controlled by neuronal circuits that integrate external sensory stimuli and induce appropriate motor responses. On the other hand, stimulus-evoked or internally generated behavior can be influenced by motivational conditions, e.g.

HDAC inhibitor-dependent transcriptome and memory reinstatement in cognitive decline models.

Aging and increased amyloid burden are major risk factors for cognitive diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD). Effective therapies for these diseases are lacking. Here, we evaluated mouse models of age-associated memory impairment and amyloid deposition to study transcriptome and cell type-specific epigenome plasticity in the brain and peripheral organs.

De-regulation of gene expression and alternative splicing affects distinct cellular pathways in the aging hippocampus.

Aging is accompanied by gradually increasing impairment of cognitive abilities and constitutes the main risk factor of neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer's disease (AD). The underlying mechanisms are however not well understood. Here we analyze the hippocampal transcriptome of young adult mice and two groups of mice at advanced age using RNA sequencing.

K-Lysine acetyltransferase 2a regulates a hippocampal gene expression network linked to memory formation.

Neuronal histone acetylation has been linked to memory consolidation, and targeting histone acetylation has emerged as a promising therapeutic strategy for neuropsychiatric diseases. However, the role of histone-modifying enzymes in the adult brain is still far from being understood. Here we use RNA sequencing to screen the levels of all known histone acetyltransferases (HATs) in the hippocampal CA1 region and find that K-acetyltransferase 2a (Kat2a)--a HAT that has not been studied for its role in memory function so far--shows highest expression.

Differential associative training enhances olfactory acuity in Drosophila melanogaster.

Training can improve the ability to discriminate between similar, confusable stimuli, including odors. One possibility of enhancing behaviorally expressed discrimination (i.e.

Mushroom body miscellanea: transgenic Drosophila strains expressing anatomical and physiological sensor proteins in Kenyon cells.

The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster represents a key model organism for analyzing how neuronal circuits regulate behavior. The mushroom body in the central brain is a particularly prominent brain region that has been intensely studied in several insect species and been implicated in a variety of behaviors, e.g.

Steroid-induced microRNA let-7 acts as a spatio-temporal code for neuronal cell fate in the developing Drosophila brain.

Mammalian neuronal stem cells produce multiple neuron types in the course of an individual's development. Similarly, neuronal progenitors in the Drosophila brain generate different types of closely related neurons that are born at specific time points during development. We found that in the post-embryonic Drosophila brain, steroid hormones act as temporal cues that specify the cell fate of mushroom body (MB) neuroblast progeny.