Our PhD student, Miriam Pillerová, continues her internship at the Department of Physiology, University of Milwaukee, USA.
Miriam studies the memory-enhancing effect of 17b-estradiol (E2). Infusion of E2 into the dorsal hippocampus (DH) enhances memory consolidation in rodents, an effect that depends upon rapid phosphorylation of extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK) and Akt, presumably in glutamatergic neurons. However, little is known about the contribution of DH astrocytes to the memory-enhancing effects of E. The main objectives of Miriam’s studies were to establish whether DH astrocytic processes are necessary for E2-mediated memory enhancement, and to determine the extent to which E2 triggers rapid ERK and Akt phosphorylation in DH astrocytes.
