Coleen Murphy Links Worm Memory Decline to Insulin-IGF Pathway in CSHL Lecture

Coleen Murphy reviewed her lab's work on aging and memory decline in a Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory lecture. Using a Pavlovian assay pairing the odor butanone with food in C. elegans, her group found memory mechanisms conserved in mammals, including CREB and synaptic proteins. CREB proved essential not only for long-term memory but also for short-term memory in long-lived daf-2 insulin/IGF-1 pathway mutants, with its importance rising with age, and transcriptional analysis pointed to the hypodermis as a metabolic tissue signaling to neurons.