Neuron
Volume 96, Issue 5, 6 December 2017, Pages 1127-1138.e4
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Article
Local Order within Global Disorder: Synaptic Architecture of Visual Space

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2017.10.017Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • Spine receptive fields are diverse and do not show global dendritic organization

  • Neighboring spines separated by less than 10 μm share receptive field properties

  • Local spines exhibit spontaneous and sensory-driven co-activity

  • Dimensionality reduction reveals functional synaptic clusters in spine populations

Summary

Substantial evidence at the subcellular level indicates that the spatial arrangement of synaptic inputs onto dendrites could play a significant role in cortical computations, but how synapses of functionally defined cortical networks are arranged within the dendrites of individual neurons remains unclear. Here we assessed one-dimensional spatial receptive fields of individual dendritic spines within individual layer 2/3 neuron dendrites. Spatial receptive field properties of dendritic spines were strikingly diverse, with no evidence of large-scale topographic organization. At a fine scale, organization was evident: neighboring spines separated by less than 10 μm shared similar spatial receptive field properties and exhibited a distance-dependent correlation in sensory-driven and spontaneous activity patterns. Fine-scale dendritic organization was supported by the fact that functional groups of spines defined by dimensionality reduction of receptive field properties exhibited non-random dendritic clustering. Our results demonstrate that functional synaptic clustering is a robust feature existing at a local spatial scale.

Keywords

dendritic spine
visual cortex
synaptic cluster

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