Kally O’Reilly earned her PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology at the University of Texas at Austin in Texas in 2008. Her thesis work focused on pharmacological induced changes in depression-related behaviors and neural network interactions in the adolescent mouse brain. She then started her postdoctoral work with Menno Witter at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience/Centre for the Biology of Memory at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim Norway. Her postdoctoral research examines the development of hippocampal/parahippocampal regions. She has focused on early postnatal development of connections using traditional retrograde and anterograde tracing techniques. The need to delineate hippocampal/parahippocampal regions for her studies has led to the synthesis of the neonatal atlas with chemoarchitectonic markers.
Contact Details
Kally C. O’Reilly, PhD
Postdoctor – Witter Group
Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, Centre for the Biology of Memory
MTFS, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
NO-7489 Trondheim, Norway
Email: kally.oreilly at(@)ntnu.no
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Synaptic plasticity/dysplasticity, process memory and item memory in rodent models of mental dysfunction.
Related Articles Synaptic plasticity/dysplasticity, process memory and item memory in rodent models of mental dysfunction. Schizophr Res. 2018 Aug 30;: Authors: O'Reilly KC, Perica MI, Fenton AA Abstract Activity-dependent changes in the effective connection strength of synapses are a fundamental feature of a nervous system. This so-called synaptic plasticity is thought to underlie storage of information in memory and has been hypothesized to be crucial for the effects of cognitive behavioral therapy. Synaptic plasticity stores information in a neural network, creating a trace of neural activity from past experience. The plasticity can also change the behavior of the network so the network can differentially transform/compute information in future activations. We discuss these two related but separable functions of synaptic plasticity; one we call "item memory" as it represents and stores items of information in memory, the other we call "process memory" as it encodes and stores functions such as computations to modify network information processing capabilities. We review evidence of item and process memory operations in behavior and evidence that experience modifies the brain's functional networks. We discuss neurodevelopmental rodent models relevant for understanding mental illness and compare two models in which one model, neonatal ventral hippocampal lesion (NVHL) has beneficial adult outcomes after being exposed to an adolescent cognitive experience that is potentially similar to cognitive behavioral therapy. The other model, gestational day 17 methylazoxymethanol acetate (GD17-MAM), does not benefit from the same adolescent cognitive experience. We propose that process memory is altered by early cognitive experience in NVHL rats but not in GD17-MAM rats, and discuss how dysplasticity factors may contribute to the differential adult outcomes after early cognitive experience in the NVHL and MAM models. PMID: 30174252 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
