Theory of spike initiation, sensory systems, autonomous behavior, epistemology
Editor Romain Brette
Systematicity: The Nature of Science (2008)
Paul Hoyningen-Huene
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11406-007-9100-x
Jan 28, 2021 - I write this commentary after reading the author's book, with the same title, which expands this article. Therefore, this commentary is largely a review of that book. What is science? It is somewhat frustrating for a scientist to not be able to answer this question precisely. Yet i...
The Life of Behavior (2019)
Alex Gomez-Marin, Asif A. Ghazanfar
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31600513
Oct 14, 2019 - In this paper, the authors remind us that in neuroscience, our “object” of study is living stuff, and they articulate three essential principles of behavior: 1) materiality, 2) agency, 3) historicity. Materiality means that nervous systems are not just abstract “information process...
Is the cell really a machine? (2019)
Daniel J. Nicholson
6 comments on PubPeer • http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31173758
Jul 25, 2019 - This is a very interesting theoretical paper, which questions the standard view of the cell as a machine. This is a not a new angle, of course, but this paper discusses a rich body of recent experimental literature to support its analysis. First, by “the cell as a machine”, the aut...
The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme (1979)
S J Gould, R C Lewontin
3 comments on PubPeer • http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/42062
Feb 20, 2019 - This is a classic paper criticizing the popular idea that evolution works by optimizing traits, proposing an adaptive story for each trait. Instead, the authors argue that organisms must be analyzed as integrated wholes with a history. They start with the example of spandrels in Sa...
A Minimal Model of Metabolism-Based Chemotaxis (2010)
Matthew D. Egbert, Xabier E. Barandiaran, Ezequiel A. Di Paolo
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1001004
Oct 31, 2018 - The authors present a minimal model of an autonomous biological agent. Most sensorimotor models are stimulus-response models, and so there is no coupling between the goals of the agent and the function of the sensorimotor system. Here they investigate numerically a very simple mode...
Cell learning (2018)
Sindy K.Y. Tang, Wallace F. Marshall
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2018.09.015
Oct 23, 2018 - This is a short review on learning in unicellular organisms, in particular ciliates (Stentor and Paramecium) and the slime mold. Different types of learning have been observed, the most studied being habituation (mostly in Stentor). Studies have shown that properties of habituation...
Representing is something that we do, not a structure that we “use”: Reply to Gładziejewski (2018)
H. Oğuz Erdin, Mark H. Bickhard
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2018.02.001
Oct 17, 2018 - This is a reply to a critique of Bickhard’s interactivist model (as well as of other action-oriented cognitive theories). The authors address various misunderstandings, and the most important one is the preconception that a representation is some kind of data structure that we use....
Progress in automating patch clamp cellular physiology (2018)
Luca A. Annecchino, Simon R. Schultz
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2398212818776561
Sep 21, 2018 - This is a review of recent work in the automation of patch clamp. The reason I discuss it in a journal of theoretical neuroscience is that I have the (slightly naïve) hope that automating patch clamp experiments could be a way for theoretical neuroscientists (specifically those wor...
The interactivist model (2009)
Mark H. Bickhard
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11229-008-9375-x
Sep 05, 2018 - This is a synthesis of Bickhard’s work on the interactivist model of cognition, in my view a very important theory, related to Gibson, O’Regan, among others (see this blog post for more detailed comments on the model). This is a deep paper which touches on many subjects. It starts ...
Science, narcissism and the quest for visibility (2017)
Bruno Lemaitre
3 comments on PubPeer • http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28186693
Jul 18, 2018 - This is an interesting analysis of narcissism in science. The author argues that: 1) the top level of the scientific hierarchy is populated by narcissistic individuals, 2) narcissism is deleterious for science because it encourages competition over cooperation, and frauds, and beca...
Top-down influences on visual processing (2013)
Charles D. Gilbert, Wu Li
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23595013
Jul 17, 2018 - This is a very interesting and important review for thinking about theory of sensory systems. In a word, the body of experimental observations reviewed here shows that what neurons do in sensory systems in terms of input processing depends on what the organism wants to do, in a way...
Autopoiesis: The organization of living systems, its characterization and a model (1974)
F.G. Varela, H.R. Maturana, R. Uribe
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0303-2647(74)90031-8
Jul 15, 2018 - This is a classic in theoretical biology. These days in neuroscience, there is some discussion about the « necessary and sufficient » methodology that pervades the field (see previous entries in this journal). That is, function is attributed to a component of the system, on the bas...
Can robots make good models of biological behaviour? (2001)
Barbara Webb
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12412325
Jun 28, 2018 - This is an essay about the epistemology of biorobotics, which consists in making robotic models of animals with the goal of understanding biology (as opposed to solving robotics problems). It is a mine of references about the epistemology of modelling, and in particular what we mea...
What Might Cognition Be, If Not Computation? (1995)
Tim Van Gelder
http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2941061
Jun 22, 2018 - Because we are so used to think of the brain as a computer, some physical thing implementing computations (hence the name of the field « computational neuroscience »), a typical reaction to criticisms of that view is : « what else could it be, if not computation ? ». The ambition o...
Causal Circuit Explanations of Behavior: Are Necessity and Sufficiency Necessary and Sufficient? (2017)
Alex Gomez-Marin
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57363-2_11
Jun 21, 2018 - This epistemological paper makes a number of important points about what constitutes an explanation in neuroscience, with many interesting pointers to relevant ideas in philosophy and psychology. A strong tendency in current literature is to identify neural circuits that are « nece...
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01677063.2018.1468443
May 30, 2018 - This epistemological paper criticizes the lack of rigor in the use of the words "necessary and sufficient" in biology, in particular in neuroscience. These are words borrowed from formal logic, where they have a specific meaning. To say that something is necessary and suf...
The Axon Initial Segment: An Updated Viewpoint (2018)
Christophe Leterrier
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29378864
May 04, 2018 - This is a well-written review on the nanoscale molecular organization of the axonal initial segment. It includes a discussion of molecular transport and filtering by the AIS, as well as molecular mechanisms of development and structural plasticity (changes in position and length), ...
Same-different problems strain convolutional neural networks (2018)
Matthew Ricci, Junkyung Kim, Thomas Serre
5 comments on PubPeer • http://arxiv.org/abs/1802.03390v3
May 04, 2018 - This paper points out some important limitations of current connectionist models, including deep learning networks. While those models can now identify objects in photos with excellent accuracy, they struggle on tasks that seem totally trivial for us, such as deciding whether two s...
Neural spiking for causal inference (2018)
Benjamin James Lansdell, Konrad Paul Kording
8 comments on PubPeer • http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/253351
May 04, 2018 - This paper introduces an interesting idea borrowed from econometrics, on how to estimate the causal effect of a neuron’s spiking on a signal (eg a future reward signal, but potentially any signal). One could for example compute the spike-triggered average of the signal, but this do...
Elinor Lazarov, Melanie Dannemeyer, Barbara Feulner, Jörg Enderlein, Michael J. Gutnick, Fred Wolf, Andreas Neef
http://arxiv.org/abs/1711.03383v1
May 04, 2018 - This study looks at the effect on spike initiation of a genetic mutation that specifically impacts an AIS-specific protein (beta-IV spectrin). That mutation seems to affect the density of Nav channels at the AIS, which becomes close to the somatic density (with the caveat that this...
A framework for testing and comparing binaural models (2018)
Mathias Dietz, Jean-Hugues Lestang, Piotr Majdak, Richard M. Stern, Torsten Marquardt, Stephan D. Ewert, William M. Hartmann, Dan F.M. Goodman
2 comments on PubPeer • http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29208336
May 04, 2018 - This paper introduces an open computational framework (on github) to test binaural models on empirical data. This is a very valuable initiative as many models have been developed but it is very difficult currently to compare them, in particular because they are written with differe...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29074766
May 04, 2018 - In this essay, Yves Frégnac criticizes the industrial-scale projects that have recently appeared in neuroscience, for example the Human Brain Project and the Brain Initiative. This type of critiscim is often heard among scientists but more rarely read in academic journals. The essa...
Multiscale memory and bioelectric error correction in the cytoplasm-cytoskeleton-membrane system (2018)
Chris Fields, Michael Levin
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29148257
May 04, 2018 - This cell biology essay was not an easy read for me, a theoretical neuroscientist, but I found it very original and insightful. It criticizes the concept of the genome as a program. Indeed, genes by themselves only determine the primary structure of potential proteins (actually not...
Cleaning patch-clamp pipettes for immediate reuse (2016)
I. Kolb, W. A. Stoy, E. B. Rousseau, O. A. Moody, A. Jenkins, C. R. Forest
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27725751
May 04, 2018 - This is a simple but very interesting study where the authors show that it is possible to clean patch clamp pipettes in Alconox up to 10 times, and reuse the pipettes on different cells with no noticeable effect. This is what was missing to truly automate patch clamp, as it was pre...
Integration of autopatching with automated pipette and cell detection in vitro (2016)
Qiuyu Wu 吴秋雨, Ilya Kolb, Brendan M. Callahan, Zhaolun Su, William Stoy, Suhasa B. Kodandaramaiah, Rachael Neve, Hongkui Zeng, Edward S. Boyden, Craig R. Forest, Alexander A. Chubykin
1 comment on PubPeer • http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27385800
May 04, 2018 - This study adapts the automated patch-clamp technique introduced in Kodandaramaiah et al. (2016) to slices. The approach is visually guided (using simple computer vision algorithms); the motorized manipulator is also automatically calibrated with the camera, using a pipette detecti...
MATLAB-based automated patch-clamp system for awake behaving mice (2015)
Niraj S. Desai, Jennifer J. Siegel, William Taylor, Raymond A. Chitwood, Daniel Johnston
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26084901
May 04, 2018 - This is similar to the blind in vivo automatic patch-clamp technique of Kodandaramaiah et al. (2016), with a few differences. One is that it is written in Matlab, also proprietary software. The more interesting difference, in my view, is the pressure controller. Instead of using 4 ...
Automated whole-cell patch-clamp electrophysiology of neurons in vivo (2012)
Suhasa B Kodandaramaiah, Giovanni Talei Franzesi, Brian Y Chow, Edward S Boyden, Craig R Forest
1 comment on PubPeer • http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22561988
May 04, 2018 - This is the first demonstration of automatic patch-clamp in intact cells (i.e., not with patch clamp chips which work with suspensions). It was done in vivo, which is actually simpler than in vitro because it is blind: the pipette is lowered until a cell is detected, which is signa...
Yuriy Zhurov, Vladimir Brezina
1 comment on PubPeer • http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16807335
May 04, 2018 - This study shows that the precise spike timing of motoneurons controlling a feeding muscle of Aplysia has strong effect on its contraction. This is surprising because that muscle is a slow muscle that contracts over seconds, but adding or removing just one spike has a very strong a...
Motor control by precisely timed spike patterns (2017)
Kyle H. Srivastava, Caroline M. Holmes, Michiel Vellema, Andrea R. Pack, Coen P. H. Elemans, Ilya Nemenman, Samuel J. Sober
1 comment on PubPeer • http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28100491
May 04, 2018 - This study shows that the precise spike timing of vertebrate motoneurons has significant behavioral effect, by looking at breathing in songbirds, which is slow compared to the time scale of spike patterns. Long recordings are obtained with an MEA, together with air pressure and for...
Spikes alone do not behavior make: why neuroscience needs biomechanics (2011)
ED Tytell, P Holmes, AH Cohen
2 comments on PubPeer • http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21683575
May 04, 2018 - This review makes the point that behavior results not only from neural activity but also from the mechanical properties of the body, or more broadly from the coupling between body and environment. A famous example in robotics is McGeer’s passive walker. The paper draws on many inte...
Neuroscience Needs Behavior: Correcting a Reductionist Bias (2017)
John W. Krakauer, Asif A. Ghazanfar, Alex Gomez-Marin, Malcolm A. MacIver, David Poeppel
2 comments on PubPeer • http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28182904
May 04, 2018 - From the perspective of a computational neuroscientist, I believe a very important point is made here. Models are judged on their ability to account for experimental data, so the critical question is what counts as relevant data? Data currently used to constrain models in systems n...
Deep impact: unintended consequences of journal rank (2013)
Björn Brembs, Katherine Button, Marcus Munafò
2 comments on PubPeer • http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23805088
May 04, 2018 - The authors look at the relation between journal rank (derived from impact factor) and various indicators, for example effect sizes reported, statistical power, etc. In summary, they found that the only thing journal rank strongly correlates with is the proportion of retractions an...
An energy budget for signaling in the grey matter of the brain (2001)
David Attwell, Simon B. Laughlin
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11598490
May 04, 2018 - This is an old but important paper on energetics of the brain, in particular: how much does it cost to maintain the resting potential? How much does it cost to propagate a spike? The paper explains some theoretical ideas to do these estimations, and is also a good source for releva...
Skander Mensi, Olivier Hagens, Wulfram Gerstner, Christian Pozzorini
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26907675
May 04, 2018 - I had to love this paper, because the authors basically experimentally confirm every theoretical prediction we had made in our paper on spike threshold adaptation (Platkiewicz and Brette, 2011). Essentially, what we had done is derive the dynamics of spike threshold from the dynami...
Martina Michalikova, Michiel W. H. Remme, Richard Kempter
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28068338
May 04, 2018 - Using simulations of detailed models, the authors propose to explain the observation of spikelets in vivo (small all-or-none events) by the failed propagation of axonal spikes to the soma. Under certain circumstances, they show that a spike generated at the distal axonal initiation...
Myosin II activity is required for structural plasticity at the axon initial segment (2017)
Mark D Evans, Candida Tufo, Adna S Dumitrescu, Matthew S Grubb
3 comments on PubPeer • http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/101584
May 04, 2018 - A number of studies have shown that the AIS can move over hours or days, with various manipulations such as depolarizing the neuron (as in this study) or stimulating it optogenetically. Two open questions: what are the molecular mechanisms involved in this displacement? Is it actua...
Abandon Statistical Significance (2017)
Blakeley B. McShane, David Gal, Andrew Gelman, Christian Robert, Jennifer L. Tackett
2 comments on PubPeer • http://arxiv.org/abs/1709.07588v2
May 03, 2018 - Recently, there has a been a lot of discussion about issues of reproducibility in the biomedical and psychological literature. Some people argue that the threshold for statistical signifance should be lowered, say p = 0.01 instead of 0.05. This paper argues, and in my opinion right...
M-current inhibition rapidly induces a unique CK2-dependent plasticity of the axon initial segment (2017)
Jonathan Lezmy, Maya Lipinsky, Yana Khrapunsky, Eti Patrich, Lia Shalom, Asher Peretz, Ilya A. Fleidervish, Bernard Attali
1 comment on PubPeer • http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29109270
May 03, 2018 - Recent studies have shown that the axon initial segment (AIS) can move, extend or shrink in response to various treatments. Here the authors show that inhibiting the M-current (a hyperpolarizing K+ current) induces a distal shift of the AIS together with changes in excitability. Th...
Tracking individual action potentials throughout mammalian axonal arbors (2017)
Milos Radivojevic, Felix Franke, Michael Altermatt, Jan Müller, Andreas Hierlemann, Douglas J Bakkum
2 comments on PubPeer • http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28990925
May 03, 2018 - This study uses a high-density multielectrode array (MEA) to analyze the propagation of an action potential in the axon of cultured neurons. The device has 11011 electrodes, and can record 126 simultaneously. The authors trigger a spike extracellularly, then record the spike-trigge...
The nano-architecture of the axonal cytoskeleton (2017)
Christophe Leterrier, Pankaj Dubey, Subhojit Roy
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29097785
May 03, 2018 - This is a very interesting review on recent discoveries about the axonal cytoskeleton, which have been made possible in particular by super-resolution microscopy. One of these discoveries is the actin rings that are periodically spaced along the axon. The roles of these rings are n...
Learning Feedforward and Recurrent Deterministic Spiking Neuron Network Feedback Controllers (2017)
Tae Seung Kang, Arunava Banerjee
http://arxiv.org/abs/1708.02603v1
May 03, 2018 - The authors study how spiking neurons can control an inverted pendulum. Each spike produces a force acting on the pendulum (like a muscle twitch), and the observed variables (angle and its derivative) are inputs to the neurons (it’s a single layer). The question is how to set the p...
Dipolar extracellular potentials generated by axonal projections (2017)
Thomas McColgan, Ji Liu, Paula Tuulia Kuokkanen, Catherine Emily Carr, Hermann Wagner, Richard Kempter
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28871959
May 03, 2018 - The authors show that the terminal zone of an axon bundle can generate a strong dipolar extracellular field. This is particularly the case in the auditory brainstem of barn owls (and most likely of mammals), where there is a strong extracellular potential (several mV) locked to the...
A Dynamic Clamp on Every Rig (2017)
Niraj S. Desai, Richard Gray, Daniel Johnston
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29085905
May 03, 2018 - This paper presents a low-cost dynamic clamp system implemented with a Teensy microcontroller, which works independently of the recording PC. It makes using the dynamic clamp much simpler, when one would otherwise need an operating system with a real time kernel. The associated web...
Ion channels enable electrical communication in bacterial communities (2015)
Arthur Prindle, Jintao Liu, Munehiro Asally, San Ly, Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo, Gürol M. Süel
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26503040
May 03, 2018 - This paper describes oscillations of membrane potential and extracellular potassium in a bacterial population (shown indirectly with an optical sensor), which show radial synchronization (ie same Vm for cells at the same radius). The proposed mechanism is as follows. A wave of depo...
Robotic Automation of In Vivo Two-Photon Targeted Whole-Cell Patch-Clamp Electrophysiology (2017)
Luca A. Annecchino, Alexander R. Morris, Caroline S. Copeland, Oshiorenoya E. Agabi, Paul Chadderton, Simon R. Schultz
1 comment on PubPeer • http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28858615
May 03, 2018 - This is an improvement of automatic patch-clamp systems to patch a visually identified cell, which is very similar to a simultaneously published algorithm by Suk et al. (2017). It uses image processing to track movements of the cell induced by movements of the pipette, both fluores...
Ho-Jun Suk, Ingrid van Welie, Suhasa B. Kodandaramaiah, Brian Allen, Craig R. Forest, Edward S. Boyden
1 comment on PubPeer • http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28858614
May 03, 2018 - This is an improvement of previously developed automatic patch-clamp systems. The algorithm in Wu et al. (2016) could patch a visually identified cell, but it required some human intervention in about half of the cases. The main reason is that pipette movements induce movements of ...
Levels and loops: the future of artificial intelligence and neuroscience (1999)
Anthony J. Bell
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10670021
May 03, 2018 - This is an interesting epistemological paper which discusses two important ideas in neuroscience. One is the ubiquity of loops. For example, the output of one neuron ultimately influences its own inputs because of cycles in synaptic networks. Sensory signals drive action, and actio...
The eardrums move when the eyes move: A multisensory effect on the mechanics of hearing (2017)
Kurtis G. Gruters, David L. K. Murphy, Cole D. Jenson, David W. Smith, Christopher A. Shera, Jennifer M. Groh
1 comment on PubPeer • http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/156570
May 03, 2018 - This is an intriguing paper showing that the eardrums move in conjunction with the eyes. Specifically, when the eyes saccade to the left, the eardrums move to the right (and conversely), and then oscillate at 30 Hz for a few cycles (possibly more, as the dampening could be the resu...
A stable brain from unstable components: Emerging concepts and implications for neural computation (2017)
Anna R. Chambers, Simon Rumpel
1 comment on PubPeer • http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroscience.2017.06.005
May 03, 2018 - The authors review recent experimental evidence showing that in vivo, in the absence of any particular task (in particular learning task), synapses and functional properties of single neurons are not stable. For example, spines disappear and reappear; more significant in my view, m...
Ionic current correlations are ubiquitous across phyla (2017)
Trinh Tran, Cagri T. Unal, Laszlo Zaborszky, Horacio G. Rotstein, Alfredo Kirkwood, Jorge P. Golowasch
3 comments on PubPeer • http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/137133
May 03, 2018 - This is a short paper showing that in mice, a number of ionic conductances vary across cells in a correlated way. This is shown in particular in hippocampal granule cells, which are very compact (important to interpret the results because of space clamp issues). This phenomenon had...
Non-overlapping Neural Networks in Hydra vulgaris (2017)
Christophe Dupre, Rafael Yuste
1 comment on PubPeer • http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28366745
May 03, 2018 - This paper introduces the cnidarian Hydra as a model system for neuroscience, showing that the activity of the entire nervous system (a decentralized nervous system called “nerve net”) can be measured with calcium imaging at single neuron resolution, as the animal is small and tran...
Recording action potential propagation in single axons using multi-electrode arrays (2017)
Kenneth R. Tovar, Daniel C. Bridges, Bian Wu, Connor Randall, Morgane Audouard, Jiwon Jang, Paul K. Hansma, Kenneth S. Kosik
1 comment on PubPeer • http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/126425
May 03, 2018 - The authors use an MEA on cultured neurons to record the propagation of action potentials in single neurons, and how it changes over days. The electrode signals quite clearly allow identifying the initiation site (presumably, AIS) and axonal processes. The authors show for example ...
A Darwinian theory for the origin of cellular differentiation (1997)
J. J. Kupiec
1 comment on PubPeer • http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9236778
May 03, 2018 - This paper is 20 years old but there is a recent paper providing experimental support to the theory (Richard et al., 2016). Although this may seem quite far from theoretical neuroscience, I believe the ideas sketched in this paper are very interesting for the questions of learning ...
1 comment on PubPeer • http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21135048
May 03, 2018 - I believe this is an important essay for theoretical neuroscientists, where modern evolutionary ideas are explained. This is essentially a critique of the idea of a “genetic code”, specifically of the reductionist idea that a gene (in the modern sense of DNA sequence) encodes a par...
Signal propagation in Drosophila central neurons (2009)
Nathan W Gouwens, Rachel I Wilson
1 comment on PubPeer • http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19439602
May 03, 2018 - Spike initiation in invertebrate neurons is quite different from vertebrate neurons. In the typical vertebrate neuron, synaptic currents from the dendrites are gathered at the soma, and spikes are initiated in the axon, which starts from the soma. In the typical invertebrate neuron...
Homeostatic Plasticity of Subcellular Neuronal Structures: From Inputs to Outputs (2016)
Winnie Wefelmeyer, Christopher J. Puhl, Juan Burrone
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27637565
May 03, 2018 - This review highlights recent findings on structural plasticity of synapses and the axonal initial segment (AIS). I was especially interested in the AIS part. Several recent studies show that the AIS can change position and length with different manipulations, for example photogene...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3659918
May 03, 2018 - This 30 years-old paper is not very well known, but I find it fascinating. In the retina, axons of ganglion cells converge to the optic disk where they then form the optic nerve. The optic nerve is myelinated, but the part of the axons within the retina is not. Because all axons fi...
Dendritic trafficking faces physiologically critical speed-precision tradeoffs (2016)
Alex H Williams, Cian O'Donnell, Terrence J Sejnowski, Timothy O'Leary
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28034367
May 03, 2018 - Plasticity and protein turnover require intracellular transport of molecules. How can molecules be delivered at the right place? A popular model is the “sushi belt” model: material moves along a belt (microtubules) and synapses pick from it at a variable rate. There are different w...
Andre Maia Chagas, Lucia Prieto Godino, Aristides B. Arrenberg, Tom Baden
2 comments on PubPeer • http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/122812
May 03, 2018 - This is quite exciting: the authors demonstrate the use of a 3D printed platform, with some basic electronics (Arduino, Raspberry Pi), which includes a microscope, manipulators, Peltier heating, and everything necessary to do optogenetics and fluorescence imaging, and behavioral tr...