Cooperative synapse formation in the neocortex

By Tarec Fares, A. Stepanyants. 2009

65 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Neuron morphology plays an important role in defining synaptic connectivity. Clearly, only pairs of neurons with closely positioned axonal and dendritic branches can be synaptically coupled. For excitatory neurons in the cerebral cortex, such axo-dendritic oppositions, termed potential synapses, must be bridged by dendritic spines to form synaptic connections. To explore the rules by which synaptic connections are formed within the constraints imposed by neuron morphology, we compared the distributions of the numbers of actual and potential synapses between pre- and postsynaptic neurons forming different laminar projections in rat barrel cortex. Quantitative comparison explicitly ruled out the hypothesis that individual synapses between neurons are formed independently of each other. Instead, the data are consistent with a cooperative scheme of synapse formation where multiple-synaptic connections between neurons are stabilized while neurons that do not establish a critical number of synapses are not likely to remain synaptically coupled.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

Structural Synaptic Plasticity Has High Memory Capacity and Can Explain Graded Amnesia, Catastrophic Forgetting, and the Spacing Effect (2014, background): “[59] for neuroanatomical estimates of ( ) in various cortical areas.”
Spike-Timing Dependence of Structural Plasticity Explains Cooperative Synapse Formation in the Neocortex (2012, methodology): “[20] provide the distribution P(N) for N up to Nmax~20.”
The Emergence of Organizing Structure in Conceptual Representation (2016, background): “…sparsity is a general principle with broad application in both neuroscience and cognitive science, whether used to describe synaptic connectivity (Fares & Stepanyants, 2009; Kalisman, Silberberg, & Markram, 2005), neural activation (Olshausen & Field, 1996), or environmental structure (Navarro &…”