Spinogenesis and Pruning Scales across Functional Hierarchies

By Guy N. Elston, Tomofumi Oga, I. Fujita. 2009

159 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Spinogenesis and synaptic pruning during development are widely believed to subserve connectional specificity in the mature CNS via Hebbian-type reinforcement. Refinement of neuronal circuit through this “use it or lose it” principle is considered critical for brain development. Here we demonstrate that the magnitude of spinogenesis and pruning in the basal dendritic trees of pyramidal cells differ dramatically among sensory, association, and executive cortex. Moreover, somewhat counterintuitively, we demonstrate that the dendritic trees of pyramidal cells in the primary visual area actually lose more spines than they grow following the onset of visual experience. The present findings reveal that the process of synaptic refinement differs not only according to time, but also location.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Statistics and Probability

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

1. Marcus E. Raichle
2. Mark A. Mintun
3. Abraham Z. Snyder
4. Friedrich T. Sommer
5. D. V. Van Essen

In Statistics and Probability

1. Mert Rory Sabuncu
2. Friedrich T. Sommer
3. D. V. Van Essen

Citations in the corpus

• Structural Synaptic Plasticity Has High Memory Capacity and Can Explain Graded Amnesia, Catastrophic Forgetting, and the Spacing Effect (2014, background): “This contrasts with some experimental results suggesting that silent synapses could be quite stable [114] whereas even strong synapses could be eliminated, for example, during development [51].”
• Regional aerobic glycolysis in the human brain (2010, background): “Although it is unlikely that such experiments will be conducted in humans, primate models of spinogenesis (53) provide an ideal model system for quantitative in vivo metabolic studies with PET and complementary studies of enzyme activity.”
• Similar patterns of cortical expansion during human development and evolution (2010, methodology): “In the adult macaque, dendritic size and complexity vary 3-fold across the cortex: branching patterns are smallest and simplest in low-expanding regions (V1 and V2) (27), intermediate in intermediate-expanding regions (7a, LIPv, and MT) (28–30), and greatest in highexpanding regions (FEF, DLPFC, 7b,”
• Individual Variability in Functional Connectivity Architecture of the Human Brain (2013, background): “Finally, the dynamics of synaptic overproduction in early childhood and consecutive synaptic pruning may contribute to a similar functional hierarchy, where synaptic overproduction is highest in the prefrontal cortex and lowest in primary sensory regions (Elston et al., 2009; Jacobs et al., 1997).”
• Extraordinary neoteny of synaptic spines in the human prefrontal cortex (2011, background): “Furthermore, recent data on identified neurons obtained from both the rhesus monkey (47) and human (48) showed marked regional differences in the number of spines grown and pruned in the basal dendritic tree of layer III pyramidal neurons.”
• Neurodevelopment of the association cortices: Patterns, mechanisms, and implications for psychopathology (2021, unknown): “These features include markers of glutamatergic neurotransmission (Froudist-Walsh et al., 2021; van den Heuvel et al., 2016b; Hoftman et al., 2018), the ratio of excitatory to inhibitory neurotransmitter receptors (Goulas et al., 2021), and excitatory neuron spine counts (Elston et al., 2009).”