The Cellular And Molecular Mechanisms Of (-) Clausenamide On Synaptic Plasticity

Neuroscience is the frontier of life science. Following the great advances of life sciences especially the active and rapid developing molecular biology in the 20th century, the brain, one of the most complex systems in nature, is becoming the key scientific subject. Neurobiology was called the last frontier and the great challenge to sciences. Learning and memory is the advanced integrating function in the brain that provides very important information for elucidating the essence of the brain, and it is related to some of aging and neurodengenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's diseases. Therefore, it is very important to study learning and memory for understanding and protecting the brain. It is becoming the hot topic in neuroscience. Synaptic plasticity including long-term potentiation (LTP), long-term depression (LTD) and metaplasticity is the neurobiological basis for learning and memory, which is the best model of learning and memory in the cellular/synaptic level and also a useful tools for screenning nootropic agents and studying their nootropic mechanism.Clausenamide is a compound isolated from clausena lansium (lour) Skeels, and has been synthesized and resoluted into levorotatory and dextorotatory clausenamide by our chemists. In the previous neuropharmacological study, (-) clausenamide has been shown to facilitate learning and memory, and to improve amnesia impaired by anisodine, NaNO₂ and Aβ. Moreover, it was found that (-) clausenamide could enhance the basic synaptic transmission and LTP induced by high-frequency stimulation in the dentate gyrus of anesthetized and freely moving rats. The cellular and molecular mechanism of (-) clausenamide on synaptic...