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Pattern and not magnitude of neural activity determines dendritic spine stability in awake mice

Nature Neuroscience volume 15, pages 949–951 (2012)Cite this article

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Abstract

The stability of dendritic spines in the neocortex is profoundly influenced by sensory experience, which determines the magnitude and pattern of neural firing. By optically manipulating the temporal structure of neural activity in vivo using channelrhodopsin-2 and repeatedly imaging dendritic spines along these stimulated neurons over a period of weeks, we show that the specific pattern, rather than the total amount of activity, determines spine stability in awake mice.

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Figure 1: Chr2-mediated and spontaneous activity in awake mice.
Figure 2: Spine stability is determined by the pattern of activity.

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Acknowledgements

We wish to thank S.T. Carmichael for his help with quantitative real-time PCR, A. Silva for generously providing access to his two-photon microscope for some of these experiments, S. Kuhlman for her help with spike wave-form analysis, E. Ruthazer for critical comments on earlier versions of this manuscript and G. Feng (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) for generously supplying the Thy1-Chr2-YFP mice. This work was funded by grants from the US National Eye Institute (EY016052) and from the US National Institute for Mental Health (MH077972).

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Author notes

  1. Ryan M Wyatt and Elaine Tring: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neurobiology, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, USA

    Ryan M Wyatt, Elaine Tring & Joshua T Trachtenberg

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  1. Ryan M Wyatt
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  2. Elaine Tring
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  3. Joshua T Trachtenberg
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Contributions

R.M.W. conducted the longitudinal dendritic spine imaging experiments, analyzed the data and wrote the manuscript. E.T. conducted the awake, behaving cell-attached patch recordings. J.T.T. designed and supervised the project and wrote the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Joshua T Trachtenberg.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Text and Figures

Supplementary Figures 1–3 (PDF 3621 kb)

Supplementary Video 1

Video of head-restrained mouse maneuvering on a floating Styrofoam ball (MOV 3292 kb)

Supplementary Video 2

Video of a mouse wearing a head-fixed blue LED that is flashing at 2 Hz once every 2 seconds (MOV 3015 kb)

Supplementary Video 3

Video of a mouse wearing a head-fixed blue LED that is flashing at 10 Hz once every 10 seconds (MOV 3507 kb)

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Wyatt, R., Tring, E. & Trachtenberg, J. Pattern and not magnitude of neural activity determines dendritic spine stability in awake mice. Nat Neurosci 15, 949–951 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3134

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