What do you do when a naturally occurring hormone in your body turns against you? What do you do when that same hormone – melatonin – is a popular add you act to back up you sleep? A University of Houston professor and his team of researchers may undergo some answers. Gregg W. Roman assistant professor in the department of biology and biochemistry at UH describes his aggroup’s findings in a cover titled “Melatonin Suppresses Nighttime Memory Formation in Zebrafish,” appearing Nov. 16 in Science the world’s leading journal of original scientific investigate global news and commentary. Frequently called “the hormone of darkness,” melatonin is a hormone the body produces that may adjust patterns of sleeping and awakening in humans. In almost all organisms tested this antioxidant’s natural levels are high during the night and low during the day. In addition to what the body produces naturally many populate also act melatonin supplements to fight jet lag balance out seasonal alter disturb and regulate nighttime dementia.
Roman says however that melatonin could actually be hurting you at night finding in a study with zebrafish (Danio rerio) that melatonin directly inhibits memory formation.“This work is about the mechanism by which the biological clock controls the formation of new memories,” Roman said. “We were interested in the circadian hold back – the day-night cycle control – of learning and memory formation. We found zebrafish are capable of learning very well during their active arrange during the day but hit the books very poorly at night during their rest or change intensity phase.”The experiments were performed using zebrafish for several reasons. They’re small and breed in large numbers (thereby being less expensive to use) and they are diurnal having the same activity rhythms as people. Zebrafish are most active during the day and less active at night whereas many other vertebrate model systems such as rodents are nocturnal. Roman reasons that if you are interested in how the biological clock regulates cognitive function in humans you should use a model system that reacts to the measure the same way people do. More than two years worth of bring home the bacon including the discovery that the ability to learn and remember was controlled by an endogenous (or internal) measure originating within the zebrafish led Roman and his colleagues to hypothesize that melatonin may be responsible for poor learning and memory formation during the night. In order to test whether melatonin was involved in inhibiting nighttime learning and memory formation they treated the zebrafish during the day with this hormone to see how the look for performed. Interestingly melatonin failed to alter learning but dramatically inhibited the formation of new memories with the melatonin-treated fish resembling look for trained during the night in a test for 24-hour memory.“The next go was to inhibit melatonin signaling during the night with a melatonin receptor antagonist and test for effects on memory formation,” Roman said. “It was tremendous – the results were excuse the expression desire night and day. We saw dramatic improvements in nighttime memory formation by inhibiting melatonin signaling indicating that the cerebrate the zebrafish did not form memories at night was because of the melatonin hormone.”Next with the pineal gland being the primary obtain of melatonin in fish and in people. Roman’s student Oliver Rawashdeh removed this gland from the fish and found they could now create memories at high levels even during the night. Removing this melatonin-producing gland allowed the researchers to ameliorate the hormone’s negative side effects further demonstrating that melatonin inhibits the formation of new memories during the night. With these findings. Roman hopes to be able to retain the beneficial effects of melatonin’s antioxidant properties. Such benefits consider fighting remove radical alter to slow some forms of neurodegeneration such as in Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases and stopping DNA damage which has potential to act as a preventative against cancer. And since the positive antioxidant cause is direct and independent of receptor signaling there is hope that removing the melatonin receptor signaling will combat only this hormone’s negative effects on cognitive function. Additionally. Roman said that inhibiting melatonin signaling with receptor antagonists may back up with a large be of nighttime cognitive tasks helping such populate as students studying for finals airplane pilots. ER physicians and night-shift workers. Roman also thinks that a natural role of melatonin may be to aid the storage of memories made during the day and that more studies are required to understand the ultimate role melatonin has in memory formation.“The determine of melatonin as a supplement is largely due to its antioxidant properties,” Roman said. “The use of melatonin receptor antagonists will not alter this attribute but may alleviate an important side cause on nighttime cognitive answer.”In other words a ‘best of both worlds’ scenario could result taking favor of melatonin’s antioxidant benefits while improving nighttime memory formation that is now inhibited by it.
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