Activity-dependent synaptic plasticity is a fundamental feature of CNS synapses. Intriguingly, the capacity of synapses to express plastic changes is itself subject to considerable activity-dependent variation, or metaplasticity. These forms of higher order plasticity are important because they may be crucial to maintain synapses within a dynamic functional range. In this study, we asked whethe...

The dentate gyrus continues to produce granule neurons throughout life. Mossy fibers, the axons of granule neurons, undergo atypical sprouting in both clinical and experimental mesial temporal lobe epilepsy. Mossy fiber sprouting (MFS) has been hypothesized to underlie the network reorganization that is thought to produce spontaneously recurring seizures, possibly via the formation of new recur...

1 Department of Neurology, Luzhou Medical College, Luzhou, 646000, China 2 Center for Nuclear Receptors and Cell Signaling, University of Houston, 3605 Cullen Blvd, Houston, TX 77204, USA 3 Department of Neurology, The first affiliated hospital of Chongqing medical university, Chongqing, 40016, China 4 Department of otolaryngology, Guizhou Provincial People's Hospital, Guiyang, 550002, China 5 ...

Low-frequency stimulation of hippocampal mossy fiber axons in zinc-deficient adult rats produced synaptic responses that declined in amplitude with successive stimuli. This response decrement is abnormal and suggests that the heavy deposits of zinc in mossy fiber boutons are important for synaptic transmission.

Several neurotransmitters, including GABA acting at presynaptic GABA(B) receptors, modulate glutamate release at synapses between hippocampal mossy fibers and CA3 pyramidal neurons. This phenomenon gates excitation of the hippocampus and may therefore prevent limbic seizure propagation. Here we report that status epilepticus, triggered by either perforant path stimulation or pilocarpine adminis...

Epilepsy is the second most common neurologic disorder, and among epilepsies temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) is the most common form of symptomatic epilepsy. Symptomatic TLE generally develops in three phases: initial -insult → epileptogenesis → epilepsy (i.e., spontaneous seizures). Several cellular and molecular alterations occur in epileptic brain, including neuronal loss, neurogenesis, and axo...

We have tested the ability of several specific agonists of glutamate metabotropic receptors (mGluRs) to depress synaptic transmission at mossy fiber synapses in the CA3 region of the guinea pig hippocampus. 1S,3R-1-amino-cyclopentyl-1,3-dicarboxylate (ACPD) reversibly inhibited monosynaptic mossy fiber field potentials, presumably by a presynaptic mechanism, with an EC50 of 2.0 +/- 0.4 microM (...

The N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor-independent form of long-term potentiation (LTP) at hippocampal mossy fiber synapses requires presynaptic Ca(2+)-dependent activation of adenylyl cyclase. To determine whether this form of LTP might occur at other synapses, we examined cerebellar parallel fibers that, like hippocampal mossy fiber synapses, express high levels of the Ca2+/calmodulin-sensitive ad...