Publication Date:
2011-06-28
Description:
The individual functional properties and spatial arrangement of afferent synaptic inputs on dendrites have a critical role in the processing of information by neurons in the mammalian brain. Although recent work has identified visually-evoked local dendritic calcium signals in the rodent visual cortex, sensory-evoked signalling on the level of dendritic spines, corresponding to individual afferent excitatory synapses, remains unexplored. Here we used a new variant of high-resolution two-photon imaging to detect sensory-evoked calcium transients in single dendritic spines of mouse cortical neurons in vivo. Calcium signals evoked by sound stimulation required the activation of NMDA (N-methyl-D-aspartate) receptors. Active spines are widely distributed on basal and apical dendrites and pure-tone stimulation at different frequencies revealed both narrowly and widely tuned spines. Notably, spines tuned for different frequencies were highly interspersed on the same dendrites: even neighbouring spines were mostly tuned to different frequencies. Thus, our results demonstrate that NMDA-receptor-dependent single-spine synaptic inputs to the same dendrite are highly heterogeneous. Furthermore, our study opens the way for in vivo mapping of functionally defined afferent sensory inputs with single-synapse resolution.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Chen, Xiaowei -- Leischner, Ulrich -- Rochefort, Nathalie L -- Nelken, Israel -- Konnerth, Arthur -- England -- Nature. 2011 Jun 26;475(7357):501-5. doi: 10.1038/nature10193.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Institute of Neuroscience and Center for Integrated Protein Science, Technical University Munich, Biedersteinerstrasse 29, 80802 Munich, Germany.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21706031" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Acoustic Stimulation
;
Animals
;
*Brain Mapping
;
*Calcium Signaling
;
Dendritic Spines/*physiology
;
Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
;
Mice
;
Mice, Inbred C57BL
;
Microscopy, Fluorescence, Multiphoton
;
Visual Cortex/cytology/*physiology
Print ISSN:
0028-0836
Electronic ISSN:
1476-4687
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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