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The Journal of Neuroscience, March 11, 2009, 29(10):3271-3275; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5216-08.2009

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Brief Communications
Spinogenesis and Pruning Scales across Functional Hierarchies

Guy N. Elston,¹ Tomofumi Oga,² and Ichiro Fujita²

¹Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, Sunshine Coast, Queensland 4562, Australia, and ²Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences, Osaka University, Toyonaka, Osaka 560-8531, Japan

Correspondence should be addressed to Dr. Guy N. Elston, Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, 60 Duke Road, Doonan, Sunshine Coast, Queensland 4562, Australia. Email: guyelston{at}yahoo.com

Spinogenesis and synaptic pruning during development are widely believed to subserve connectional specificity in the mature CNS via Hebbian-type reinforcement. Refinement of neuronal circuit through this "use it or lose it" principle is considered critical for brain development. Here we demonstrate that the magnitude of spinogenesis and pruning in the basal dendritic trees of pyramidal cells differ dramatically among sensory, association, and executive cortex. Moreover, somewhat counterintuitively, we demonstrate that the dendritic trees of pyramidal cells in the primary visual area actually lose more spines than they grow following the onset of visual experience. The present findings reveal that the process of synaptic refinement differs not only according to time, but also location.

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Received Oct. 28, 2008; revised Dec. 16, 2008; accepted Jan. 14, 2009.

Correspondence should be addressed to Dr. Guy N. Elston, Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, 60 Duke Road, Doonan, Sunshine Coast, Queensland 4562, Australia. Email: guyelston{at}yahoo.com

This article has been cited by other articles:

				G. N. Elston, T. Oga, T. Okamoto, and I. Fujita Spinogenesis and Pruning from Early Visual Onset to Adulthood: An Intracellular Injection Study of Layer III Pyramidal Cells in the Ventral Visual Cortical Pathway of the Macaque Monkey Cereb Cortex, October 21, 2009; (2009) bhp203v1. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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