This intriguing research has received plenty of attention, Â both when it was presented at the Society of Neuroscience meeting in the fall and then when the results were published in Nature Neuroscience.
The short summary is: researchers at Yerkes National Primate Research Center found that when a mouse learns to become afraid of a certain odor, his or her pups will be more Gafas Ray Ban Baratas sensitive to that odor, even though the pups have never encountered it. Both the parent mouse and pups have more space in the smell-processing part of their brains, called the olfactory bulb, devoted to the odor to which they are sensitive.
[Note: a feature on a similar phenomenon, transgenerational inheritance of the effects of chemical exposure, appeared in Science this week]
Somehow information about the parent’s experiences is being inherited. But how? Brian Dias and Kerry Ressler are now pursuing followup experiments to firmly establish what’s going on. They discuss their research in this video:
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