A protein that’s made in your brain at night helps you remember things, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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NPTX2 is a protein that’s pivotal for helping your brain decide to remember certain things and forget others, and when levels of it decline it suggests that neurodegenerative processes like dementia may be beginning. That’s according to research by Paul Worley, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins, and colleagues.

Worley: It's a synaptic protein and it's an immediate early gene. So it's a gene that's just rapidly transcribed and translated as neurons engage in information processing, and it's required for memory consolidation. So it's part of this process that we have come to understand to be a cyclical, diurnal daily process that increases the strength of synapses during the day and reduces and sheds and refines the synapses during the night.   :34

Worley says understanding this process points the way toward interventions. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.