Dendritic spine changes associated with hippocampal long-term synaptic plasticity

Florian Engert and Tobias Bonhoeffer
Additional contact information
Florian Engert: Max-Planck Institute of Neurobiology
Tobias Bonhoeffer: Max-Planck Institute of Neurobiology

Nature, 1999, vol. 399, issue 6731, 66-70

Abstract: Abstract Long-term enhancement of synaptic efficacy in the hippocampus is an important model for studying the cellular mechanisms of neuronal plasticity, circuit reorganization, and even learning and memory1. Although these long-lasting functional changes are easy to induce, it has been very difficult to demonstrate that they are accompanied or even caused by morphological changes on the subcellular level. Here we combined a local superfusion technique2,3 with two-photon imaging4, which allowed us to scrutinize specific regions of the postsynaptic dendrite where we knew that the synaptic changes had to occur. We show that after induction of long-lasting (but not short-lasting) functional enhancement of synapses in area CA1, new spines appear on the postsynaptic dendrite, whereas in control regions on the same dendrite or in slices where long-term potentiation was blocked, no significant spine growth occurred.

Date: 1999
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/19978 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:399:y:1999:i:6731:d:10.1038_19978

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/19978

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().