Sulfate groups on complex sugar molecules called glycosaminoglycans affect ‘plasticity’ in the brains of mice, according to a team of researchers led by Caltech’s Professor Linda Hsieh-Wilson. Determining how glycosaminoglycans function could help us understand how memory and learning work in humans, and provide ways to repair neural connectivity after injuries.
The sugars that sweeten fruits, candies or cakes are actually just a few simple varieties of the many types of sugars that exist. When strung together, they can make a wide array of complex sugars.
Glycosaminoglycans are formed by then attaching other chemical structures, including sulfate groups.
“If we study the chemistry of glycosaminoglycans in the brain, we can learn about brain plasticity and hopefully, in the future, use this information to restore or enhance neural connections involved in memory,” Professor Hsieh-Wilson said.
“These sugars regulate numerous proteins, and their structures change during development and with disease.”
In the brain, the most common glycosaminoglycan form is chondroitin sulfate, which is found throughout the extracellular matrix surrounding the brain’s many cells.
Chondroitin sulfate can also form structures known as ‘perineuronal nets,’ which wrap around individual neurons and stabilize the synaptic connections between them.
One way a glycosaminoglycan’s function can be changed is through sulfation motifs, or patterns of sulfate groups tacked onto the sugar chains.
Professor Hsieh-Wilson and her colleagues are interested in how those sulfation patterns become altered, and how they might regulate biological processes such as neuroplasticity and social memory.
This could also one day allow researchers to modulate these functions as a potential treatment for central nervous system injuries, neurodegenerative diseases or psychiatric disorders.
When the study authors deleted the Chst11 gene responsible for forming two major sulfation patterns on…
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