Protein kinase C: A nexus in the biochemical events that underlie associative learning

Abstract

We have proposed that protein kinase C, an enzyme critical to cell regulation of growth, secretion and differentiation, is a part of a sequence of molecular events that underlie learning and memory. Electrophysiological, biochemical and neuro-imaging methods have been employed to show that the enzyme changes its distribution as a result of memory storage within the neural networks that are necessary for the acquisition and performance of various learning tasks in several species. We propose here, a model of protein kinase C as a molecular signal for the association of synaptic input that is parsimonious with the recent data, mainly from our laboratory, concerning its function in memory formation.