An association study of the genetic polymorphisms in 13 neural plasticity-related genes with semantic and episodic memories.

Semantic and episodic memories were two different attributes of long-term memory. In the past few years, plenty of physiological evidence has indicated that neural plasticity is involved in the formation of long-term memory. In the present study, we hypothesized that some functional variants of neural plasticity-related genes were related to episodic and semantic memories. To confirm this hypothesis, we examined the relationship of 13 plasticity-related genes with episodic and semantic memories. The results indicated that there was a statistically significant difference in semantic memory scores among the three genotype groups of T267C in 5-HT ( 6 ) (χ (2) = 16.638, p = 0.0002). However, the functional variations in BDNF, COMT, DBH, DRD ( 2 ), DRD ( 3 ), DRD ( 4 ), MAOA, TPH ( 2 ), 5-HT ( 2A ), GRM ( 1 ), and GRIN2B had no observable effects on the memories. Our preliminary results confirm the hypothesis that a small number of functional variants of the neural plasticity-related genes, such as T267C in 5-HT ( 6 ), play important roles in human specific memory.