Senile sea snails are helping us to understand how memory loss occurs
JUST in case sea snails aren’t slow enough, new research has found that they get more sluggish when they grow old — and the discovery is helping us to understand how memory loss happens in humans.
It turns out that the sea snail, which has a one-year lifespan, is actually a good model to study nerve cells and how the nervous system works in people. The simplicity of the snail’s body gives researchers the chance to view how different the system works more directly.
“You can count the number of nerve cells that are relevant to a reflex,” said Lynne Fieber, a professor at the University of Miami who leads research with the snails at the school.
She and a team of researchers have been using the slimy little critters to learn how nerve cells respond to electric shock. They “taught” the snails to quickly contract their muscle tails by administering electric shocks and then poking the tails, a process called “sensitisation.” They then studied the responses at various ages.
The scientists, whose work was published this week in the journal PlOS One, found that the senior citizen specimens do not learn to contract from the shock very well. As the snails grow older, their tail startle reflex lessened, and then disappeared.
By studying the reflexes of the older snails, scientists were able to zero-in on the exact cells in the nervous system that stop working, highlighting where we need to look to understand the mechanics of age-related memory loss in humans.
“It’s a thrilling discovery,” Fieber said. — WP-Bloomberg