HOME HELP FEEDBACK SUBSCRIPTIONS ARCHIVE SEARCH TABLE OF CONTENTS		QUICK SEARCH:   [advanced] Author: Keyword(s): Year:  Vol:  Page:

This Article Full Text Full Text (PDF) A corrigendum has been published All Versions of this Article: 101/6/3226    most recent 91349.2008v1 Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Citation Map Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in Web of Science Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via Web of Science (1) Google Scholar Articles by Gidon, A. Articles by Segev, I. PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Gidon, A. Articles by Segev, I.

Spike-Timing–Dependent Synaptic Plasticity and Synaptic Democracy in Dendrites

¹Department of Neurobiology and ²Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel

Submitted 22 December 2008; accepted in final form 6 April 2009

We explored in a computational study the effect of dendrites on excitatory synapses undergoing spike-timing–dependent plasticity (STDP), using both cylindrical dendritic models and reconstructed dendritic trees. We show that even if the initial strength, g_peak, of distal synapses is augmented in a location independent manner, the efficacy of distal synapses diminishes following STDP and proximal synapses would eventually dominate. Indeed, proximal synapses always win over distal synapses following linear STDP rule, independent of the initial synaptic strength distribution in the dendritic tree. This effect is more pronounced as the dendritic cable length increases but it does not depend on the dendritic branching structure. Adding a small multiplicative component to the linear STDP rule, whereby already strong synapses tend to be less potentiated than depressed (and vice versa for weak synapses) did partially "save" distal synapses from "dying out." Another successful strategy for balancing the efficacy of distal and proximal synapses following STDP is to increase the upper bound for the synaptic conductance (g_max) with distance from the soma. We conclude by discussing an experiment for assessing which of these possible strategies might actually operate in dendrites.