The hormone that controls the body’s hunger pangs may also boost the memory, according to Scottish scientists, BBC News website said.
Researchers at Dundee University have found a link between the hormone leptin and the brain’s memory and learning process.
Leptin controls food intake and body weight and staves off the urge to eat.
The study was carried out by a team which specializes in the brain cell processes that produce learning and memory.
Jenni Harvey, one of the researchers, said, “The hormone leptin, which is known to control food intake and body weight, has been shown to exert a profound influence on learning and memory processes in a region of the brain called the hippocampus.
“Leptin enhances the level of communication between brain cells in the hippocampus in a process known as long-term potentiation (LTP).“
It has been shown previously that people suffering from obesity have defects in their leptin levels and in the LTP process.
The group’s findings could therefore shed light on how obesity affects learning and memory.
Dr. Harvey said, “Defects in either leptin or genes that regulate leptin result in obesity and also cause impairments in LTP.“
The team is currently examining the precise mechanisms that are responsible for the effects of leptin on LTP.

The mice are able to defeat the much larger birds by biting the same spot over and over.

On one of the Earth’s most remote islands, mice have learned, and are apparently teaching each other, how to attack and kill bird chicks that are 200 times their size, nature.com, reported
Far from exulting in the cleverness of mice, the researchers who discovered this want to eradicate the rodents from the island in order to save endangered albatrosses.
Biologists on Gough Island, a speck in the Atlantic between the southern tips of Africa and South America, first learned of the problem when they found that tristan albatrosses (Diomedea dabbenena) were losing their chicks at an extremely high rate: up to 80% were dying.
Researchers suspected that house mice, which were accidentally introduced to the island, might be the culprits. So husband-and-wife team Ross Wanless and Andrea Angel spent a year on the island videotaping birds’ nests and collecting data.
The videos confirm that mice are taking on the chicks, biting them over and over until they die from loss of blood or infection. Wanless, an invasive-species biologist from the Percy FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, vividly recalls watching the first videos. “It was carnage. Chicks half alive, with massive gaping wounds and guts hanging out.“
The mice are able to defeat the much larger birds by biting the same spot over and over. They take advantage of the fact that the birds, which have evolved in an area that has been without land predators for millions of years, have no defensive response against such attacks.

A protein that provides a vital passage through a bacterium’s outer cell wall will misfold and malfunction if that wall is built of the ’wrong’ material, scientists at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston report in a finding that has long-term implications for understanding diseases caused by misfolded proteins such as cystic fibrosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and mad cow disease, brightsurf.com reported.
The paper in today’s Journal of Biological Chemistry by Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology William Dowhan, Ph.D., and colleagues shows that phospholipids, which make up the permeable barrier of cell membranes, play a direct role in the folding of membrane proteins--proteins that penetrate the membrane or bind to either side of it.
Dowhan and colleagues looked at how a protein called GabP, which transports an amino acid across the membrane of the bacterium E. coli, is affected by the presence of a phospholipid named phosphatidylethanolamine, or PE for short.
Phospholipids, unlike their fatty acid and cholesterol cousins, include a phosphate group that spurs them to form a bilayer with water-friendly outer layers sandwiching an impermeable water-unfriendly inner layer that defines the outer surface of cells.
Transport of nutrients and waste material across the cell membrane is then governed by the specific proteins associated with it.
In a strain of E. coli lacking PE, the GabP protein misfolded, with two areas of the protein inverting from their normal structure.
The PE-lacking protein’s amino acid transfer rate plummeted to nearly zero, falling 99 percent compared to the transfer rate in unaltered E. coli with PE.
GabP is the third membrane protein that Dowhan and colleagues have shown to be affected by the presence of PE.