Use Real-time MRI to Track Nitric Oxide in Our Brain
By Yijia Zhou
We have already known that nitric oxide plays a important part in long-term potentiation as a neurotransmission in our brain, especially in hippocampus, and consequently plays an important role in both short-term memory and long-term memory. Thank to the physic basis of magnetic resonance imaging(MRI), any nucleus with a net nuclear spin, including nitrogen, could potentially be imaged with MRI, and the appearance of real-time MRI gives us a chance to obtain movies of the physiological activity in real time. Accordingly, we can use specialized real-time MRI technology to watch how nitric oxide act in our hippocampus or even in the whole brain when a human is learning something and trying to remember them. It is obvious that it can enrich our knowledge about how our memory is formed, or even how we study.
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