Spontaneous Activity Drives Local Synaptic Plasticity In Vivo
- Winnubst, Johan
- Cheyne, Juliette E
- Niculescu, Dragos
- Lohmann, C.
DOIAbstract
Spontaneous activity fine-tunes neuronal connections in the developing brain. To explore the underlying synaptic plasticity mechanisms, we monitored naturally occurring changes in spontaneous activity at individual synapses with whole-cell patch-clamp recordings and simultaneous calcium imaging in the mouse visual cortex in vivo. Analyzing activity changes across large populations of synapses revealed a simple and efficient local plasticity rule: synapses that exhibit low synchronicity with nearby neighbors (<12 μm) become depressed in their transmission frequency. Asynchronous electrical stimulation of individual synapses in hippocampal slices showed that this is due to a decrease in synaptic transmission efficiency. Accordingly, experimen...
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