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I'd need to read the paper, but the write up seems to ignore the possibility that methylation is required to express the genes necessary to form memories, and n
by rflrob 13y ago
I'd need to read the paper, but the write up seems to ignore the possibility that methylation is required to express the genes necessary to form memories, and not that the methylation itself is, in any meaningful sense, the memory itself (as in "memories [...] get written onto DNA).
- karpathy 13y agoThis was my first reaction as well. Blocking methylation is a drastically global operation for a cell as methylation is involved in so much of the epigenetic regulation. Turning it off probably disabled much of the normal functioning of those cells and could have had all kinds of downstream effects. It doesn't seem fair to jump to the conclusion that the memory is actually encoded in the methylation pattern somehow. Based on a skim of the paper, the researchers don't seem to claim this either.
- dekhn 13y agoAh, I only skimmed the article describing it, and originally jumped to the conclusion they had actually claimed that "memory state" (IE factual encoding) was being stored in methylation. Modification of gene expression of genes associated with memory (in the form of changes to neuronal toplogy and excitation thresholds) seems like a more mundane and reasonable explanation.
- dnautics 13y agothe title in the write up is unnecessarily sensational, your impression is exactly the model proposed in the paper. You could not read out the methylation pattern in a cell and retrieve the memory, the memory is the methylation + the cells.