Neurons (blue) of a rat develop new synapses (green) in the orbitofrontal cortex

When memorizing long-term olfactive information, neurons (blue) of a rat develop new synapses (green) in the orbitofrontal cortex. The researchers explore how the brain can form and store enduring olfactory associative memories. Besides these changes in the architecture of cortical networks (structural plasticity), their findings demonstrated that an initial step of "early tagging of cortical neurons" by specific proteins is required, at the time of encoding, to allow the progressive integration and long-term stabilization of memories within these neurons a few weeks later.