NMDA spikes in basal dendrites of cortical pyramidal neurons

Jackie Schiller (), Guy Major, Helmut J. Koester and Yitzhak Schiller
Additional contact information
Jackie Schiller: Departments of Physiology and Biophysics Technion Medical School
Guy Major: Biological Computation Research-Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies
Helmut J. Koester: Max-Planck-Institute for Medical Research
Yitzhak Schiller: Rambam Medical Center

Nature, 2000, vol. 404, issue 6775, 285-289

Abstract: Abstract Basal dendrites are a major target for synaptic inputs innervating cortical pyramidal neurons1. At present little is known about signal processing in these fine dendrites. Here we show that co-activation of clustered neighbouring basal inputs initiated local dendritic spikes, which resulted in a 5.9 ± 1.5 mV (peak) and 64.4 ± 19.8 ms (half-width) cable-filtered voltage change at the soma that amplified the somatic voltage response by 226 ± 46%. These spikes were accompanied by large calcium transients restricted to the activated dendritic segment. In contrast to conventional sodium or calcium spikes, these spikes were mediated mostly by NMDA (N -methyl-D-aspartate) receptor channels, which contributed at least 80% of the total charge. The ionic mechanism of these NMDA spikes may allow ‘dynamic spike-initiation zones’, set by the spatial distribution of glutamate pre-bound to NMDA receptors, which in turn would depend on recent and ongoing activity in the cortical network. In addition, NMDA spikes may serve as a powerful mechanism for modification of the cortical network by inducing long-term strengthening of co-activated neighbouring inputs.

Date: 2000
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/35005094 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:404:y:2000:i:6775:d:10.1038_35005094

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

DOI: 10.1038/35005094

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 ().