Long-term potentiation: two pathways meet at neurogranin

Since the discovery of hippocampal long-term potentiation (LTP) as a cellular equivalent of learning and memory, hundreds of molecules belonging to different signal transduction pathways have been implicated in the mechanism underlying LTP. To understand LTP, it is therefore important to elucidate how different signal transduction pathways intersect with each other. Neurogranin/RC3, a calmodulin-trapping protein kinase C (PKC)-substrate featuring in new work reported in this issue of The EMBO Journal (Zhong et al, 2009), seems ideally situated to serve as such a point of crosstalk between two major signalling pathways involved in LTP.