Two things happen when you get old: one… your memory goes, two… can’t remember
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
Imagine your aging brain as a vintage sports car: engine’s fine, but not very fast. Why?
The protein HDAC3 is an emergency brake pruning memory formation. Remembering everything would be too much. In old age, this brake stays jammed on and we remember very little. What can we do?
Enter research from Alyssa Rodriguez and team from UC, Irvine. They found a molecular switch for this e-brake protein!
Turning it off in aging mice reversed memory impairments! The mice’s object location memory improved!
Huh. Guess old brains don’t lose their drive, they’re just stuck in park.
Rodriguez, A. C., Kramár, E. A., Augustynski, A. S., Keiser, A. A., Dong, T. N., Jones, T. S., Vakilian, S. N., Patel, S. T., Rounds, J. S., Chinn, C. A., Kwapis, J. L., Matheos, D. P., & Wood, M. A. (2025). HDAC3 Serine 424 Phospho-mimic and Phospho-null Mutants Bidirectionally Modulate Long-Term Memory Formation and Synaptic Plasticity in the Adult and Aging Mouse Brain. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 45(29), e1619242025. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1619-24.2025