Abstract
Long-term potentiation (LTP) has been extensively studied in the rat hippocampus, but short-term potentiation (STP) has received comparatively little attention. We examined the minimal requirement for STP induction using coincident stimulation of a test pathway and a conditioning pathway. Remarkably, only several closely spaced test stimuli (forming a single minimal burst) were sufficient to induce STP in that pathway. Thus, the similar bursts that occur in vivo are likely to induce STP. Unlike other candidate mechanisms lor STM, STP has associative properties. STP encodes information for minutes: it decays with two components, a fast component (1.6 ± 0.26 min) and a slower one (19 ± 6.6 min). STP is strongly dependent on GluR1: the fast decaying STP component was almost absent in the GluR1 knockout mouse. Because recent work (Sanderson et al., 2009) shows that short-term memory (STM) is selectively reduced in the GluR1 knockout, STP is a likely mechanism for STM.