The Experimental Research On The Relationship Between The N-ethylmaleimide-sensitive Fusion Protein Of Hippocampal CA1 And Spatial Learning Memory Deficits

Background and ObjectiveAlthough the clinical syndrome of Parkinson's disease (PD) and epilepsy are different, both of them belong to the neurodegenerative diseases and have the common typical neuropathological characters, which are the large degeneration and loss of the neurons. The pathological mechanisms are related to the abnormal release of neurotransmitters and neuropeptides. There is an increasing recognition of accompanying impairments in cognition in PD patients. These deficits predominantly affect visual-spatial working memory and develop into the idiot severely. In adults, complex partial seizures such as those occur in temporal lobe epilepsy have the poorest prognosis of all types of seizures, with about 60~70% of all patients having intractable seizures, whose main syndrome is that the patients can't control the spontaneous recurrent seizure (SRS) and depend on the antiepileptic drugs all life. Temporal lobe epilepsy accompanied the psychiatric comorbidity 4—12 times higher than the other types of epilepsy, which focused on the idiotic or psychiatric comorbidity. Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry in Chinese Academy of Sciences cooperated with us and identified an epilepsy-related gene named ERG1 (GenBank accession no. AF142097), which is a gene cloned in the hippocampus of the rats with SRS after kainic acid (KA) injection for 3 weeks. Sequence analysis revealed that ERG1, a SRS related gene, has high similarity to N-ethylmaleimide-sensitive fusion protein (NSF) gene. NSF encoded by ERG1/NSF is an ATPase, which plays a key role in vesicular trafficking and involves the fusion of synaptic vesicles with the presynaptic membrane during the release of neurotransmitter. It also regulates the formation of synapses plasticity. However, the relationship between NSF and learning memory is still unclear. In this study, we used...