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When you interact with the world around you, your experiences are recorded as changes in the connection strengths between neurons in your brain. This process, called synaptic plasticity, alters how information flows through your brain and is critical for learning, memory, and even injury recovery. New research has identified a critical role for a signaling enzyme called Protein Kinase C delta (PKCd) in this process. The team of scientists developed biosensors to track the activity of PKCd during plasticity, overcoming long-standing challenges in studying its function. Through this new approach, they found that PKCd created a 'butterfly effect' transmitting local signals from a few of the thousands of synapses in a neuron to regulate cell-wide changes in gene expression.
