Public Release: 

What are memories made of?

New study sheds light on key protein

University of Colorado at Boulder




But in a new paper funded by the National Institutes of Health, Hoeffer and his co-authors spell it out for the first time, showing that AKT comes in three distinct varieties residing in different kinds of brain cells and affecting brain health in very distinct ways.

The discovery could lead to new, more targeted treatments for everything from glioblastoma--the brain cancer Sen. John McCain has--to Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia.

"AKT is a central protein that has been implicated in a bevy of neurological diseases yet we know amazingly little about it," Hoeffer said. "Our paper is the first to comprehensively examine what its different forms are doing in the brain and where."

Discovered in the 1970s and known best as an "oncogene" (one that, when mutated, can promote cancer), AKT has more recently been identified as a key player in promoting "synaptic plasticity," the brain's ability to strengthen cellular connections in response to experience.

"Let's say you see a great white shark and you are scared and your brain wants to form a memory of what's going on. You have to make new proteins to encode that memory," he said. AKT is one of the first proteins to come online, a central switch that turns on the memory factory.

But not all AKTs are created equal.


They made a number of key discoveries:


"That is a really important finding," said co-author Josien Levenga, who worked on the project as a postdoctoral researcher at CU Boulder. "If you could develop a drug that targeted only AKT2 without impacting other forms, it might be more effective in treating certain issues with fewer side-effects."



"Before this, there was an assumption that they all did basically the same thing in the same cells in the same way. Now we know better," Hoeffer said.





Lead author and postdoctoral researcher Josien Levenga, and postdoctoral researcher Helen Wong and graduate student Ryan Milstead also contributed to the study.


Charles Hoeffer
Department of Integrative Physiology

Lisa Marshall
CU Boulder media relations
