Research article

Early calcium increase triggers the formation of olfactory long-term memory in honeybees

Emmanuel Perisse^1,2 , Valérie Raymond-Delpech^1,3 , Isabelle Néant^2,3 , Yukihisa Matsumoto¹ , Catherine Leclerc^2,3 , Marc Moreau^2,3 and Jean-Christophe Sandoz^1,3

¹Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale (CRCA), Université de Toulouse, CNRS, Toulouse, France

²Centre de Biologie de Développement (CBD), Université de Toulouse, CNRS, Toulouse, France

³GDR 2688 'Role of calcium in gene expression in normal and pathological conditions'

author email corresponding author email

BMC Biology 2009, 7:30doi:10.1186/1741-7007-7-30

Published:	16 June 2009

Abstract

Background

Synaptic plasticity associated with an important wave of gene transcription and protein synthesis underlies long-term memory processes. Calcium (Ca²⁺) plays an important role in a variety of neuronal functions and indirect evidence suggests that it may be involved in synaptic plasticity and in the regulation of gene expression correlated to long-term memory formation. The aim of this study was to determine whether Ca²⁺ is necessary and sufficient for inducing long-term memory formation. A suitable model to address this question is the Pavlovian appetitive conditioning of the proboscis extension reflex in the honeybee Apis mellifera, in which animals learn to associate an odor with a sucrose reward.

Results

By modulating the intracellular Ca²⁺ concentration ([Ca²⁺]i) in the brain, we show that: (i) blocking [Ca²⁺]i increase during multiple-trial conditioning selectively impairs long-term memory performance; (ii) conversely, increasing [Ca²⁺]i during single-trial conditioning triggers long-term memory formation; and finally, (iii) as was the case for long-term memory produced by multiple-trial conditioning, enhancement of long-term memory performance induced by a [Ca²⁺]i increase depends on de novo protein synthesis.

Conclusion

Altogether our data suggest that during olfactory conditioning Ca²⁺ is both a necessary and a sufficient signal for the formation of protein-dependent long-term memory. Ca²⁺ therefore appears to act as a switch between short- and long-term storage of learned information.