Spine plasticity articles within Nature

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• Letter | 10 October 2018

  Cervical excitatory neurons sustain breathing after spinal cord injury

  A population of cervical interneurons is identified that can regulate diaphragm function by modulating phrenic motor neurons; targeting this small population of neurons may be a functional strategy to restore breathing after traumatic spinal cord injury.

  • Kajana Satkunendrarajah
  • , Spyridon K. Karadimas
  •  & Michael G. Fehlings

• Article | 09 September 2015

  Labelling and optical erasure of synaptic memory traces in the motor cortex

  A new light-activated probe that targets recently active neuronal spines for manipulation induces shrinkage of recently potentiated spines following a motor learning task; spine shrinkage disrupted learning, suggesting a causal relationship between the specific subset of targeted spines and the learned behaviour.

  • Akiko Hayashi-Takagi
  • , Sho Yagishita
  •  & Haruo Kasai

• Letter | 22 June 2015

  Impermanence of dendritic spines in live adult CA1 hippocampus

  A new microendoscopic method reveals that hippocampal dendritic spines in the CA1 region undergo a complete turnover in less than six weeks in adult mice; this contrasts with the much greater stability of synapses in the neocortex and provides a physical basis for the fact that episodic memories are only retained by the mouse hippocampus for a few weeks.

  • Alessio Attardo
  • , James E. Fitzgerald
  •  & Mark J. Schnitzer

• Letter | 04 May 2014

  Emergence of reproducible spatiotemporal activity during motor learning

  Inhibitory neuron activity is found to be relatively stable during motor learning whereas excitatory neuron activity is much more dynamic — the results indicate that a large number of neurons exhibit activity changes early on during motor learning, but this population is refined with subsequent practice.

  • Andrew J. Peters
  • , Simon X. Chen
  •  & Takaki Komiyama

• Letter | 20 March 2011

  Local, persistent activation of Rho GTPases during plasticity of single dendritic spines

  Even brief neuronal activity can result in long-term potentiation of synapses, which is associated with enlargement of dendritic spines on the neuron at the receiving end of neurotransmission. Using live imaging of fluorescently tagged signalling proteins in individual dendritic spines, this study shows that transient activation of the Ca²⁺/calmodulin-dependent kinase is translated into short-term versus long-term and long-range (dendritic) versus short-range (spine-confined) signalling, depending on which small GTPase of the Rho family is activated. The technique is bringing the study of the cellular bases of learning and memory down to the nanometre scale.

  • Hideji Murakoshi
  • , Hong Wang
  •  & Ryohei Yasuda