SURPRISE! A Viruslike Protein is Important for Cognition and Memory

Posted on by Sable Aradia

Holy actual sh*t! This changes everything!

A protein involved in cognition and storing long-term memories looks and acts like a protein from viruses. The protein, called Arc, has properties similar to those that viruses use for infecting host cells, and originated from a chance evolutionary event that occurred hundreds of millions of years ago.

The prospect that virus-like proteins could be the basis for a novel form of cell-to-cell communication in the brain could change our understanding of how memories are made, according to Jason Shepherd, a neuroscientist at University of Utah Health and senior author of the study publishing in the journal Cell on Jan. 11.

Read the full article at Unews Utah.

Related papers:

The Neuronal Gene Arc Encodes a Repurposed Retrotransposon Gag Protein that Mediates Intercellular RNA Transfer
A Viral (Arc)hive for Metazoan Memory

One thought on “SURPRISE! A Viruslike Protein is Important for Cognition and Memory”

  1. Free from being a surprise to me at all, it is only confirmation of what I said in these two video here

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MUMsF2jrOs and also is why my Meditational Hypnosis course is in the hands of Stanford School of Medicine as on December 2016 https://youtu.be/0s-EpNY-e1s because I have been speaking about this and writing about this, channeling about this for many years now and now this is coming to light finally. Good to see 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

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I'm a Pagan and speculative fiction author, a professional blogger, and a musician. I'm proudly Canadian and proudly LGBTQ. My politics are decidedly left and if you ask for my opinion, expect an honest answer. I am owned by a cat. I recently lost my dog, who was my boon companion, and I'm taking the loss hard. I used to work part time at a bookstore and I love to read, especially about faith, philosophy, science, and sci-fi and fantasy.