Description:

The Department of Pharmacology and the Center for Molecular Innovation and Drug Discovery are pleased to announce an upcoming seminar, to be presented by:

Dr. James C. Barrow, Ph.D.,

Associate Director, Drug Discovery, and Investigator, Lieber Institute for Brain Development
Associate Professor, John Hopkins School of Medicine

The following, is an overview of this seminar, as described by Dr. Barrow:

"Major functions of the hippocampus are to generate, organize and store memory. This is a complex process, which is orchestrated by CREB. Interestingly, we have seen that this master regulator is regulated at the transcriptional level in the hippocampus by peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor α (PPARα), a nuclear hormone receptor family transcription factor that is known to control the metabolism of fatty acids in the liver, underlying a possible crosstalk between fat and memory. Although liver PPARα does not directly control hippocampal CREB, this opens up an important possibility to improve hippocampal functions by PPARα ligands and maintaining normal levels of PPARα in the hippocampus."