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“must” for all four ExoMars sites was clay. NEUROSCIENCE

On Earth, clay is deposited by water and is
excellent at preserving the remains of an-
cient organisms. The near-infrared sensors
on both MRO and Mars Express discovered
Lifelong memories may reside
a decade ago that much of Mars is covered
with clay formations hundreds of meters in nets around brain cells
thick, Bibring says—strong evidence that
water must have pooled on the surface for
Studies suggest key role for perineuronal networks of
long periods in the past. proteins and sugars in long-term memory
Researchers also wanted a site where the
clays were covered by other material for bil-
lions of years and then recently uncovered By Emily Underwood, in Chicago, Illinois cells can retain information for decades.
by wind erosion. Because ionizing radiation Some scientists believe that lifelong memo-

I
from space easily penetrates Mars’s thin n 1898, Italian biologist Camillo Golgi ries must somehow be encoded in a more
atmosphere and probably would destroy saw something odd in the slices of persistent, stable molecular structure.
any organic molecules near the surface, brain tissue he examined under his Palida’s adviser, Nobel Prize-winning

Downloaded from www.sciencemag.org on October 31, 2015

long-buried clay is more likely to harbor bio- microscope: weblike lattices surround- chemist Roger Tsien, recently began to ex-
markers today. ing many neurons. Golgi could not plore whether PNNs could play that role.
Both Oxia Planum and another site, discern their purpose, and many dis- He was inspired in part by evidence that
Mawrth Vallis, tick both boxes. Oxia Pla- missed the nets as an destroying the nets
num won out because its landing trajectory artifact of his staining in some brain regions
is better in 2018. The site is a shallow basin technique. For the next can erase fearful mem-
with layered deposits of iron and magne- century, the lattices re- ories, as well as reverse
sium phyllosilicate clay. For most of the past mained largely obscure. ocular dominance,
3.6 billion years, the clay has been covered But last week at the an- the brain’s tendency
by a layer of dark, possibly volcanic, mate- nual meeting of the So- to prefer input from
rial, which has eroded away in the past 100 ciety for Neuroscience one eye over the other,
million years. Bibring hopes the rover’s data here, researchers of- which develops early
will let him study clay from different layers fered tantalizing new during maturation
to learn how its composition changed over evidence that holes in (Science, 4 September
time. “If we can find biomarkers, they would these nets could be the 2009, p. 1258). An-
indicate which environments favored and storage sites for long- other clue came from
preserved the emergence of life. That’s fun- term memories. recent studies link-
damental,” he says, and might help explain Perineuronal nets ing abnormal PNNs
the origins of life on both Earth and Mars. (PNNs), as they are to brain disorders, in-
Oxia Planum offers another attraction: On known today, are scaf- cluding schizophrenia
its east side sprawls a 15-kilometer-wide, fan- folds of linked pro- and a form of intellec-
shaped feature that researchers think could teins and sugars that tual disability named
be an ancient river delta or alluvial fan. If so, resemble cartilage. A Costello syndrome.
it could give the rover a second opportunity growing body of re- Tsien’s group started
to look for life, because it could indicate that search suggests that by testing whether
water flowed on Mars again long after the PNNs may control the PNNs are durable, as
inundation that deposited the clay. “Maybe formation and func- a memory substrate
that [later period] might have concentrated tion of synapses, the must be. The team con-
and preserved things,” Bibring says. microscopic junctions firmed that proteins
ExoMars has had a long and often diffi- between neurons that contained in the PNNs
cult history. It started out as a standalone allow cells to communi- can survive for at least
ESA rover in 2005, but as ambitions grew cate and that may play 180 days—almost a
it became a multipart mission in collabo- a role in learning and lifetime for a mouse.
ration with NASA in 2009. NASA pulled memory, says neuro- Perineuronal nets (green) surround neurons With the help of a new
out because of budget conflicts in 2012, scientist Sakina Palida, (red) in the mouse brain. fluorescent labeling
and the mission ended up as a partnership a graduate student at technique developed
with Roscosmos. While ESA negotiates with the University of California, San Diego. by Palida, they also found PNNs through-
companies over building the 2018 space- At the meeting, Palida and colleagues at- out the brain, showing that they are not
craft, it is testing models on the ground— tracted a crowd with several new findings limited to just a few brain areas, as some
and is running behind schedule. “You want that support the hypothesis. studies had suggested.
a certain amount of margin, and right now Just how memories are stored in the Next, Palida and colleagues explored
it is very thin to nonexistent,” says Vago, brain—particularly long-term ones—is how PNNs interact with synapses, which
IMAGE: SAKINA F. PALIDA

who is working to adjust the schedule. The
project does have the fallback option of de-
laying launch of the rover until 2020; if that
proves necessary, Mawrth Vallis could come
back into the running. ■
one of the most pressing questions in
neuroscience. Most of the proteins inside
neurons are constantly being replaced—
anywhere from every couple of days to
every few hours—so it’s not clear how the
are thought to form and grow stronger
as memories are created and reinforced,
and weaken or even disappear as we for-
get. After growing neurons in a petri
dish and allowing the PNNs surrounding

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them to develop, Palida treated the cells PALEONTOLOGY

with BDNF, a brain chemical known to
stimulate neurons to form new connec-
tions. Electron microscopy showed that
wherever new synapses had emerged,
How some of the world’s
the PNN’s tight-knit lattice had devel-
oped holes, as if to accommodate the biggest dinosaurs got that way
new connections.
In a separate experiment, the group Fresh data reveal titanosaur growth stages, from egg to adult
found that genetically engineered mice
lacking an enzyme that normally degrades By Michael Balter in Dallas, Texas here, researchers presented new fossils that
the PNN performed badly on a learning chart titanosaur growth from embryo to

task in which they had to associate a shock
with a beep—a sign that they had trouble
forming new memories. Taken together,
the new data suggest that holes in the PNN
provide openings for new synapses to form,
as well as structural support that sustains
those connections and helps memories en-
dure, Palida says.
The results are “pretty cool,” and fit with
growing evidence that loose or degraded
PNNs increase neural plasticity, says
Serena Dudek, a neurobiologist at the
National Institute of Environmental Health
Sciences in Research Triangle Park, North
Carolina. At the meeting, her own lab pre-
sented evidence supporting the hypothesis
that PNNs form during so-called critical
periods: set windows of time in which
functions such as vision develop.
Little is known about what builds the
nets, although some evidence suggests that
neurons and brain cells called glia both
play a role. Barbara Sorg, a neuroscientist
at Washington State University, Vancouver,
notes that environmental factors can also
loosen up or tighten PNNs. Her research
has shown that cocaine addiction, for ex-
ample, seems to lead to the production of
more PNNs in animals, suggesting a poten-
tial mechanism for the intense and persis-
tent memories that form as a result of drug
abuse, she says.
At the meeting, Sorg’s group presented
evidence that destroying the PNN in some
regions can erase drug-associated memories,
suggesting that the process may be revers-
ible. Don’t look for PNN-dissolving therapies
anytime soon, however: The enzyme used to
break down the PNN in animals is a “very
blunt tool,” Sorg says, and there’s no know-
ing how it would affect a person.
To determine PNNs’ true role in memory,
W
hen all dinosaurs except the birds
went extinct 66 million years ago,
they exited in grand style: The last
dinos included the largest crea-
tures ever to walk the earth. These
were the titanosaurs, a group of
long-necked sauropods including Argentino-
saurus, a South American species stretching
nearly 40 meters long and weighing more
than 70 tons—as much as 15 adult elephants
and more than twice as much as the classic
sauropod, Apatosaurus.
Paleontologists and the public alike have
been fascinated by these beasts, which
“represent a possible upper ceiling for
how large life can get on land,” says Philip
Mannion, a paleontologist at Imperial Col-
lege London. Yet the titanosaur fossil record
has been pretty scrappy—just three complete
skulls have been found—leaving major mys-
teries about these behemoths. Researchers
still “need to learn a lot more” about how
and why these animals grew so big, and how
they managed to move their massive bodies,
says Luis Chiappe, director of the Dinosaur
Institute at the Natural History Museum of
Los Angeles County in California.
The picture is beginning to fill in, how-
ever. At a special session at the annual meet-
ing of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology
adult, and help explain how they moved.
Perhaps the most spectacular addition to
the record was a titanosaur egg that appar-
ently was smuggled out of Argentina years
ago, but was recently donated to a museum
and restored to science. (Collector Terry
Manning, who arranged the donation, was in
the audience and won a round of applause.)
To image the egg’s interior, a team led by
paleobiologist Martin Kundrát of Uppsala
University in Sweden probed with the high-
energy x-ray beam at the European Synchro-
tron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France.
The scan provided the most detailed look
yet at a sauropod embryo’s skull, Kundrát
said. It revealed that the facial bones ossi-
fied first, whereas the jaw and other skull
bones were still soft tissue. Although eggs of
many other dinosaurs are common, only one
clutch of titanosaur eggs has been found, all
from a single site in Patagonia. The new em-
bryonic skull looks like a different species,
Kundrát said, adding one more taxon to the
slim file on titanosaur embryos.
Another talk shed light on how titano-
saurs developed after birth. Paleontologist
Kristina Curry Rogers of Macalester College
in St. Paul unveiled one of the smallest hatch-
lings ever discovered: a tiny titanosaur from
Madagascar, Rapetosaurus krausei, com-
PHOTO: © TOM WAGNER/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

scientists will need a way to watch how

they change over time in living animals,
says Takao Hensch, a molecular biologist
at Harvard University. To do that, Tsien’s
group plans to create transgenic rodents
with fluorescent PNNs, so that their devel-
opment can be traced as the animal ages.
So far, Palida says, PNNs appear to be an
“ideal substrate for very long-term mainte-
nance of memory over time.” ■ The titanosaur Argentinosaurus was one of the largest land animals ever.

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