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Electronic Letters to:
- Cellular:
Robert J. Richardson, Jay A. Blundon, Ildar T. Bayazitov, and Stanislav S. Zakharenko- Connectivity Patterns Revealed by Mapping of Active Inputs on Dendrites of Thalamorecipient Neurons in the Auditory Cortex
J. Neurosci. 2009; 29: 6406-6417[Abstract] [Full text] [PDF]
eLetters: Submit a response to this article
Electronic letters published:
Are synapses revealed by EM only 'putative'?
- Kevan AC Martin (25 May 2009)
Are synapses revealed by EM only 'putative'? 25 May 2009 
Kevan AC Martin,
Professor
Institute of Neuroinformatics, UZH/ETH, Winterthurerstrasse 190, 8057 Zurich, SwitzerlandSend letter to journal:
Re: Are synapses revealed by EM only 'putative'?
kevan{at}ini.phys.ethz.ch Kevan AC Martin
Imagine my surprise on reading the Introduction to the interesting paper by Robert Richardson and colleagues to discover that our painstaking efforts to map cortical dendrites by serial electron microscopy had revealed only "putative synapses" (p. 6407). In case readers don’t understand what is meant here by "putative", they are reminded in the very next sentence that "proximity between axon terminal and dendritic spine does not guarantee that a site is an active, functional synapse".
The synapses I and my colleagues, and many others, have mapped through electron microscopy, were not classified as synapses by "proximity", but by long-established ultrastructural criteria, which journal editors and referees have rightly demanded as the gold-standard for structural evidence of the presence of a synapse. Indeed a worldwide movement is now dedicated to obtaining synaptic resolution maps of brain circuits through dense reconstruction by electron microscopy. If the synapses they reveal are to be downgraded to "putative", they could certainly save themselves a lot of effort by simply looking for "proximity" at light microscope level.
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