Large calyceal synapses are often regarded as simple relay points, built for high-fidelity and high-frequency synaptic transmission and a minimal requirement for synaptic plasticity, but this view is oversimplified. Calyceal synapses can exhibit surprising activity-dependent developmental plasticity. Here we compare basal synaptic transmission and activity-dependent plasticity at two stereotypi...

Homosynaptic Hebbian-type plasticity provides a cellular mechanism of learning and refinement of connectivity during development in a variety of biological systems. In this review we argue that a complimentary form of plasticity-heterosynaptic plasticity-represents a necessary cellular component for homeostatic regulation of synaptic weights and neuronal activity. The required properties of a h...

Huntington's disease (HD) is an autosomal dominant progressive and fatal neurodegenerative brain disorder caused by an expanded CAG/polyglutamine repeat in the coding region of the gene. Presymptomatic Huntington's disease patients often exhibit cognitive deficits before the onset of classical symptoms. To investigate the possibility that changes in synaptic plasticity might underlie cognitive ...

While the development and plasticity of excitatory synaptic connections have been studied into detail, little is known about the development of inhibitory synapses. As proposed for excitatory synapses, recent studies have indicated that activity-dependent forms of synaptic plasticity, such as long-term potentiation and long-term depression, may play a role in the establishment of functional inh...

The output of a neuronal network depends on the organization and functional properties of its component cells and synapses. While the characterization of synaptic properties has lagged cellular analyses, a potentially important aspect in rhythmically active networks is how network synapses affect, and are in turn affected by, network activity. This could lead to a potential circular interaction...

Correlated presynaptic and postsynaptic activity is the key factor in inducing Hebbian plasticity and memory. However, little is known about the physiological events that could mediate such coordination. Correlated cholinergic input induces spike timing-dependent plasticity-like hippocampal synaptic plasticity. Cholinergic receptors are localized to both presynaptic and postsynaptic glutamaterg...

Storage and processing of information at the synaptic level is enabled by the ability of synapses to persistently alter their efficacy. This phenomenon, known as synaptic plasticity, is believed to underlie multiple forms of long-term memory in the mammalian brain. It has become apparent that the metabotropic glutamate (mGlu) receptor is critically required for both persistent forms of memory a...

Synapses are located throughout the often-elaborate dendritic tree of central neurons. Hebbian models of plasticity require temporal association between synaptic input and neuronal output to produce long-term potentiation of excitatory transmission. Recent studies have highlighted how active dendritic spiking mechanisms control this association. Here, we review new work showing that associative...

Understanding learning and memory mechanisms is an important goal in neuroscience. To gain insights into the underlying cellular mechanisms for memory formation, synaptic plasticity processes are studied with various techniques in different brain regions. A valid model to scrutinize different ways to enhance or decrease synaptic transmission is recording of long-term potentiation (LTP) or long-...

Recent experimental results suggest that dendritic and back-propagating spikes can influence synaptic plasticity in different ways [1]. In this study we investigate how these signals could temporally interact at dendrites leading to changing plasticity properties at local synapse clusters. Similar to a previous study [2], we employ a differential Hebbian plasticity rule to emulate spike-timing ...