Keynote lecture - "Storing Memory in Prions and Amyloids"

For over a century, amyloids have been associated with pathology of the nervous system and are thought to be an unintended byproduct of protein mismanagement, an irreversible dead-end for a protein. We were thus surprised to find, while seeking to understand how memories withstand time, that certain amyloids stabilize memory. The discovery of functional amyloids in the brain forced us to rethink long-standing assumptions on how and why amyloids are formed in the brain. Beyond nervous system, emerging evidence suggests amyloids can encode other forms of cellular memory such as transcriptional memory or signaling memory. Collectively these amyloids have given us access to areas, such as what structural features make an amyloid functional, how cells assemble amyloids in a controlled way, and once formed, how cells remove amyloids when needed. We anticipate that studying amyloids as part of normal biological processes, not just pathological anomalies, will help us understand several unresolved fundamental questions in this emerging field: e.g. why through evolution do proteins retain the ability to form amyloids if they are inherently toxic? and why is the nervous system so vulnerable to amyloid-based diseases?