Drosophila Memory Consolidation: Time is of the Essence

Historically, long-term memory has been defined as that component of sustained memory that requires de novo protein synthesis around the time of training.  With the ascendency of molecular neuroscience, this operational framework has become paradigmatic, even though behavioral experiments that define systems consolidation are at odds with this narrow framework.  We present preliminary, unpublished work that suggests that even in Drosophila, memory consolidation is a temporally and spatially complex process where numerous post-training "temporal windows" are important.