Synaptic plasticity across dendritic location.

• Main Author: Jacopo Bono
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2014-04-01
• Series: Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
• Subjects: Learning; connectivity; synaptic plasticity; modeling; dendritic computation
• Online Access: http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/conf.fnsys.2014.05.00006/full

Dendrites are not just passive cables but exhibit many active mechanisms. These mechanisms result in a highly non-linear behaviour, which depends on the location of the synapses on a dendrite. We investigate how synaptic plasticity depends on the dendritic location. In particular, we implemented a voltage-based spike-timing dependent learning rule, combined with different dendritic properties. We found that synaptic plasticity shapes different connectivity patterns depending on the synaptic location, yielding different functions. This work demonstrates that single neurons can perform complex computations shaped by dendritic synaptic plasticity.