Activity dynamics lead to diverse structural plasticity at single dendritic spines

Abstract

Synapses are the sites at which learning is proposed to occur through changes in the strength of neuronal connections. Utilizing 2-photon mediated glutamate uncaging and imaging, the size of a dendritic spine and the amount of current which that synapse conducts has been shown to be linearly correlated and thus allows for structural changes in spine volumes to serve as a proxy for measuring plasticity. In order to e ciently and accurately quantify such structural dynamics, we developed a Matlab-based toolbox, named SpineS, which automatically analyses dendritic spine volume changes more rapidly, and with greater precision, based on a learned library of representative images. Regularly spaced stimulations, such as the high- and low-frequency patterns traditionally used to induce plasticity in the hippocampus, are not the most common forms of activity which occur in the brain.(...)