A protein that regulates forgetting of short-term memories, such as a new phone number or the name of a new acquaintance have been identified Scientists.

Forgetting of short-term memory is regulated within neurons by the activity of a protein called Rac, a research team led by a scientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) has found.

CSHL Professor Yi Zhong and colleagues at Tsinghua University in Beijing experimentally linked three distinct memory-erasure tasks with naturally occurring Rac activation within neurons located in a fruit fly organ called the mushroom body.

One kind of erasure is associated with gradual short-term memory loss; another entails an acute, rapid removal of short-term memory; a third involves a kind of erasure associated with new information that interferes with an existing short-term memory.

Importantly, Zhong and colleagues propose that Rac''s role in erasing memory is directly related to its function as a cytoskeleton remodeling agent. In genetically modified flies, the team elevated Rac activity in mushroom body neurons, which are the seat of olfactory-based memories in the fly.
 
The scientists reported that the Rac-dependent forgetting mechanism in flies did not affect mechanisms involved in the formation of new memories, specifically a pathway associated with the gene Rutabaga that is mediated by the enzyme adenylyl cyclase.
 
Zhong further said," The molecular basis of short-term memory really has been overlooked by the neuroscience community. It has been widely assumed that such memory is degraded through passive cellular processes. Our experiments challenge the notion by providing evidence of a dedicated mechanism for removing several kinds of short-term memories."

The journal Cell published the results online on February 19. (With Input from Agencies)