BDNF Variants May Modulate Long-Term Visual Memory Performance in a Healthy Cohort.

Nesli Avgan,Larisa Haupt,Lyn Griffiths,Claire Bellis,Heidi Sutherland,Lauren Spriggens,Omar Ibrahim,David Shum,Chieh Yu

doi:10.3390/ijms18030655

Abstract

Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is involved in numerous cognitive functions including learning and memory. BDNF plays an important role in synaptic plasticity in humans and rats with BDNF shown to be essential for the formation of long-term memories. We previously identified a significant association between the BDNF Val66Met polymorphism (rs6265) and long-term visual memory (p-value = 0.003) in a small cohort (n = 181) comprised of healthy individuals who had been phenotyped for various aspects of memory function. In this study, we have extended the cohort to 597 individuals and examined multiple genetic variants across both the BDNF and BDNF-AS genes for association with visual memory performance as assessed by the Wechsler Memory Scale—Fourth Edition subtests Visual Reproduction I and II (VR I and II). VR I assesses immediate visual memory, whereas VR II assesses long-term visual memory. Genetic association analyses were performed for 34 single nucleotide polymorphisms genotyped on Illumina OmniExpress BeadChip arrays with the immediate and long-term visual memory phenotypes. While none of the BDNF and BDNF-AS variants were shown to be significant for immediate visual memory, we found 10 variants (including the Val66Met polymorphism (p-value = 0.006)) that were nominally associated, and three variants (two variants in BDNF and one variant in the BDNF-AS locus) that were significantly associated with long-term visual memory. Our data therefore suggests a potential role for BDNF, and its anti-sense transcript BDNF-AS, in long-term visual memory performance.

Highlights

Human memory is a complex neurocognitive and polygenic trait with different memory systems responsible for its encoding-retaining-retrieving abilities [1,2]
We previously investigated the role of the Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) Val66Met polymorphism in a small cohort (n = 181) that had been phenotyped for a range of human memory sub-types
Our study identified four markers located in the BDNF gene and six markers located in the BDNF antisense RNA gene (BDNF-AS) gene as nominally associated with long-term visual memory, but which did not meet our corrected p-value threshold (0.00288)

Summary

Introduction

Human memory is a complex neurocognitive and polygenic trait with different memory systems responsible for its encoding-retaining-retrieving abilities [1,2]. The traditional memory model consists of three parts—sensory memory (SM), short-term memory (STM, known as working memory), and long-term memory (LTM)—and was named as “the modal model” by Richard Atkinson and Richard Schifrin in 1968 [3]. The shortest-term element of memory is SM, which holds information after a stimulus is received through the five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. The visual element of SM, is named as iconic memory [4]. When the information held by SM becomes more durable it is transferred to STM. STM has a limited capacity and a limited time frame [5,6]

Methods

Results

Conclusion