Journal
NATURE
Volume 475, Issue 7357, Pages 501-U97Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/nature10193
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Funding
- Schiedel Foundation
- German-Israeli Foundation (GIF) [1002/2008]
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [IRTG 1373]
- Bundesministerium fur Bildung und Forschung (BMBF)
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The individual functional properties and spatial arrangement of afferent synaptic inputs on dendrites have a critical role in the processing of information by neurons in the mammalian brain(1-4). Although recent work has identified visually-evoked local dendritic calcium signals in the rodent visual cortex(5), sensory-evoked signalling on the level of dendritic spines, corresponding to individual afferent excitatory synapses, remains unexplored(6). Here we used a new variant of high-resolution two-photon imaging(7) to detect sensory-evoked calcium transients in single dendritic spines of mouse cortical neurons in vivo. Calcium signals evoked by sound stimulation required the activation of NMDA (N-methyl-D-aspartate) receptors. Active spines are widely distributed on basal and apical dendrites and pure-tone stimulation at different frequencies revealed both narrowly and widely tuned spines. Notably, spines tuned for different frequencies were highly interspersed on the same dendrites: even neighbouring spines were mostly tuned to different frequencies. Thus, our results demonstrate that NMDA-receptor-dependent single-spine synaptic inputs to the same dendrite are highly heterogeneous. Furthermore, our study opens the way for in vivo mapping of functionally defined afferent sensory inputs with single-synapse resolution.
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