Article Information
- Received August 23, 1999
- Revision received October 1, 1999
- Accepted October 6, 1999
- First published December 15, 1999.
- Version of record published December 15, 1999.
Author Information
- 1Brain Research Institute, University of Zurich, CH-8057 Zurich, Switzerland,
- 2Unité de Neurocybernétique Cellulaire, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Unité Propre de Recherche 9041, F-13009 Marseille, France, and
- 3Department of Physiology, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland 21201
Author contributions
Disclosures
- Received August 23, 1999.
- Revision received October 1, 1999.
- Accepted October 6, 1999.
This work was supported by the Roche and Dr. Eric Slack-Gyr Foundations, and Swiss National Science Foundation Grant 31–42174.94. We thank L. Heeb, E. Hochreutener, R. Kägi, H. Kasper, L. Rietschin, and R. Schöb for excellent technical assistance.
Correspondence should be addressed to Dominique Debanne, Unité de Neurocybernétique Cellulaire, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Unité Propre de Recherche 9041, 280 Boulevard Sainte-Marguerite, 13009 Marseille, France. E-mail:debanne{at}marseille.inserm.fr.
aWe shall refer to the EPSP elicited in paired recordings as a “unitary” response and those elicited by stimulation of large numbers of presynaptic axons with extracellular stimulation as “multi-unitary” responses. Similarly, a synapse is defined as a contact between a presynaptic release site and a postsynaptic cell. Minimal stimulation is reputed to result in activation of a single synapse (for detailed criteria, seeExperimental Procedures in Dobrunz and Stevens, 1997) (but see Larkman et al., 1997). Unitary responses in hippocampal slice cultures typically reflect activation of several synapses (Debanne et al., 1996b).
