Insulin Signaling Plays a Dual Role in Caenorhabditis elegans Memory Acquisition and Memory Retrieval

• DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.4636-09.2010
• Publication Date: 2010-06-09T17:53:18Z
• Authors: C. H. A. Lin; M. Tomioka; S. Pereira; L. Sellings; Y. Iino; D. van der Kooy
• Keywords: 0301 basic medicine; 0303 health sciences; Conditioning, Classical; Phosphatidylinositols; Receptor, Insulin; Receptor, IGF Type 1; Phosphatidylinositol 3-Kinases; 03 medical and health sciences; Memory; Starvation; Benzaldehydes; Mutation; Odorants; Avoidance Learning; Animals; Insulin; Caenorhabditis elegans; Caenorhabditis elegans Proteins; Signal Transduction

Insulin signaling plays a prominent role in regulation of dauer formation and longevity <i>Caenorhabditis elegans</i>. Here, we show that insulin also is required benzaldehyde–starvation associative plasticity, which worms pre-exposed to the odor attractant benzaldehyde absence food subsequently demonstrate conditioned aversion response toward odorant. Animals with mutations insulin-related 1 (<i>ins-1</i>), abnormal 2 (<i>daf-2</i>), aging alteration (<i>age-1</i>), encode homolog human insulin, insulin/IGF-1 receptor, PIP3 kinase, respectively, demonstrated significant deficits plasticity. Using conditional allele, behavioral roles DAF-2 plasticity can be dissociated, playing more memory retrieval than acquisition. We propose acts as learning-specific starvation signal acquisition phase but functions switch benzaldehyde-sensing amphid wing C neurons into an avoidance mode during retrieval.