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Barbara Gordon-Lickey Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychology
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Dr. Gordon-Lickey is retired from teaching. She maintains an office in the Tublitz lab at the Institute.
We would like to know why the brains of young animals are more plastic than are the brains
of adult animals. By more plastic we mean more responsive to the environment. The classic
example of neural plasticity is Wiesel and Hubel's 1963 finding that closing one eye of a
kitten prevents the visual cortex from responding to the deprived eye. Closing one eye of
an adult cat does not have this effect. We are studying the role of glutamate receptors in
plasticity. We are particularly interested in the type of glutamate receptor known as the
NMDA receptor, because this receptor has been implicated in long term potentiation, a
frequently used model of synaptic plasticity. Using both homogenate binding and receptor
autoradiography, we have shown that the binding of NMDA receptor ligands to the visual
cortex increases from infancy to the time of maximum visual cortex plasticity and then
decreases. NMDA receptors are made up of several subunits. Using immunohistochemistry and
in situ hybridization, we are now investigating the possibility that some of the age
dependent changes in these receptors result from changes in subunit composition. We are
using patch clamp physiology along with immunohistochemistry to find out whether the
function of the receptors changes with their subunit composition.
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