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　Our brain is highly adaptive to the environment. In a mature brain during learning, persistent synaptic plasticity requires transcription and de novo protein synthesis, but can occur only at specific synapses. How neurons restrict their gene expression to individual synapses, thereby maximizing the computational capacity of our brain, is a central question in neuroscience. Using Aplysia neuronal culutres of sensory-motor circuit, I have demonstrated that local translation of sensorin is spatially restricted to the stimulated synapse, is stimulus-specific, transcript-selective, and requires a retrograde trans-synaptic signal from appropriate target motor neurons (Wang et al., 2009). The findings strongly support the idea that newly synthesized transcripts during learning can be locally translated at synapses undergoing persistent changes. To further investigate the orchestrated gene expression program during learning, we are currently developing fluorescent RNA probes to visualize gene expression in the brain.