The dendritic branch is the preferred integrative unit for protein synthesis-dependent LTP

By A. Govindarajan, Inbal Israely, S. Huang, S. Tonegawa. 2011

344 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary The late-phase of long-term potentiation (L-LTP), the cellular correlate of long-term memory, induced at some synapses facilitates L-LTP expression at other synapses receiving stimulation too weak to induce L-LTP by itself. Using glutamate uncaging and two-photon imaging, we demonstrate that the efficacy of this facilitation decreases with increasing time between stimulations, increasing distance between stimulated spines and with the spines being on different dendritic branches. Paradoxically, stimulated spines compete for L-LTP expression if stimulated too closely together in time. Furthermore, the facilitation is temporally bidirectional but asymmetric. Additionally, L-LTP formation is itself biased towards occurring on spines within a branch. These data support the Clustered Plasticity Hypothesis which states that such spatial and temporal limits lead to stable engram formation, preferentially at synapses clustered within dendritic branches rather than dispersed throughout the dendritic arbor. Thus, dendritic branches rather than individual synapses are the primary functional units for long-term memory storage.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Materials Chemistry, Molecular Biology

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Citations in the corpus

Structural and molecular remodeling of dendritic spine substructures during long-term potentiation (2014, result): “Consistent with previous reports (Matsuzaki et al., 2004; Harvey and Svoboda, 2007; Steiner et al., 2008; Lee et al., 2009; Govindarajan et al., 2011), induction of LTP in single dendritic spines with two-photon (2P) uncaging of glutamate produced a persistent enlargement of the spine along with a p”
Nanoconnectomic upper bound on the variability of synaptic plasticity (2015, background): “…synapses if it occurs within an hour (Frey and Morris, 1997; O’Donnell and Sejnowski, 2014), is much less effective when the synapses are on different branches (Govindarajan et al., 2011), which would tend to make two synapses from the same axon on different dendritic branches less similar.”
Synaptic tagging and capture in the living rat (2012, background): “001), but no significant decline in the ‘weakbefore-strong’ group (F(1,20)1⁄4 2.”
The Central Dogma Decentralized: New Perspectives on RNA Function and Local Translation in Neurons (2013, background): “On the other hand, other studies emphasize the consideration of the dendritic branch as a computational unit (Govindarajan et al., 2011).”