Spine regulation and structure articles within Nature

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  • Article |

    Electrophysiology combined with correlated light and electron microscopy confirms the long-standing assumption that the size of a synapse is proportional to its strength, and reveals that neocortical synapses may have greater computational capacity than thought.

    • Simone Holler
    • , German Köstinger
    •  & Ken J. Stratford

  • Letter |

    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 |

    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 |

    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 |

    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

  • Outlook |

    An injury to the spine — the long bony assemblage that supports the upper body and the spinal cord that carries nerve signals — can be grim and costly. By Bill Cannon.

    • Bill Cannon

  • Outlook |

    There are easy ways to reduce the odds of suffering a life-changing injury, says Sara Klaas.

    • Sara J. Klaas

  • Letter |

    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

  • Letter |

    The brain's capacity to respond to instructive capacity underlies behavioural learning, but how instructive experience acts on the juvenile brain, a period in which learning is often enhanced, remains unknown. Here, two-photon in vivo imaging is used to study the brains of zebra finches as they learn to sing. The results indicate that behavioural learning results when instructive experience is able to rapidly stabilize and strengthen synapses on the sensorimotor neurons that control the learned behaviour.

    • Todd F. Roberts
    • , Katherine A. Tschida
    •  & Richard Mooney

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