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Morphological changes in dendritic spines of Purkinje cells associated with motor learning

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Abstract

Experience-dependent changes of spine structure and number may contribute to long-term memory storage. Although several studies demonstrated structural spine plasticity following associative learning, there is limited evidence associating motor learning with alteration of spine morphology. Here, we investigated this issue in the cerebellar Purkinje cells using high voltage electron microscopy (HVEM). Adult rats were trained in an obstacle course, demanding significant motor coordination to complete. Control animals either traversed an obstacle-free runway or remained sedentary. Quantitative analysis of spine morphology showed that the density and length of dendritic spines along the distal dendrites of Purkinje cells were significantly increased in the rats that learned complex motor skills compared to active or inactive controls. Classification of spines into shape categories indicated that the increased spine density and length after motor learning was mainly attributable to an increase in thin spines. These findings suggest that motor learning induces structural spine plasticity in the cerebellar Purkinje neurons, which may play a crucial role in acquiring complex motor skills.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. William T. Greenough for critically reading the manuscript and comments; electron microscopy team at Korea Basic Science Institute (KBSI, Daejeon, Republic of Korea); Scott P. Herrick, Sang Hoon Lee, and In Sung Park for their valuable contributions to this research. This work was supported by the Korea Research Foundation Grant funded by the Korean Government (MOEHRD, Basic Research Promotion Fund) (KRF-2006-E0008) and partly supported by the cooperating program of the National

References (23)

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    In male rats, thin spines were elevated on all six days of training, reaching statistical significance on days 1, 3, and 6 (González-Tapia et al., 2017). Thin spines were also increased after 26 days of acrobatic training (González-Tapia, Velázquez-Zamora, Olvera-Cortés, & González-Burgos, 2015; Lee, Jung, Arii, Imoto, & Rhyu, 2007), along with mushroom and stubby spines (González-Tapia et al., 2015). We did not find a significant difference in Purkinje cell spine circumference after four days of acrobatic training, although the circumference of the spines did tend to be reduced in the AC group.

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1

Present address: Department of Pharmacology, Georgetown University Medical School, Washington, DC 20057, USA.

2

Present address: Protein Therapeutics Research Center, Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology, Daejeon 305-333, Republic of Korea.

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