When it comes to the billions of neurons in your brain, what you see at birth is what get—except in the hippocampus. Buried deep underneath the folds of the cerebral cortex, neural stem cells in the hippocampus continue to generate new neurons, inciting a struggle between new and old as the new attempts to gain a foothold in memory-forming center of the brain.
In a study published online in Neuron, Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT in collaboration with an international team of scientists found they could bias the competition in favor of the newly generated neurons.
“The hippocampus allows us to form new memories of ‘what, when and where’ that help us navigate our lives,” said HSCI Principal Faculty member and the study’s corresponding author, Amar Sahay, PhD, “and neurogenesis—the generation of new neurons from stem cells—is critical for keeping similar memories separate.”
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