Nanoconnectomic upper bound on the variability of synaptic plasticity
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Bartol_2015_Nanoconnectomic.pdf
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3.71 MB
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Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Bromer, Cailey
Kinney, Justin
Bartol, Thomas M.
Chirillo, Michael A.
Bourne, Jennifer N.
Harris, Kristen M.
Sejnowski, Terrence J.
Date Issued
November 2015
Journal
eLife
Publisher
eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd.
Citation
Bartol, Thomas M, Cailey Bromer, Justin Kinney, Michael A Chirillo, Jennifer N Bourne, Kristen M Harris, and Terrence J Sejnowski. “Nanoconnectomic Upper Bound on the Variability of Synaptic Plasticity.” eLife 4 (November 30, 2015).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Information in a computer is quantified by the number of bits that can be stored and recovered. An important question about the brain is how much information can be stored at a synapse through synaptic plasticity, which depends on the history of probabilistic synaptic activity. The strong correlation between size and efficacy of a synapse allowed us to estimate the variability of synaptic plasticity. In an EM reconstruction of hippocampal neuropil we found single axons making two or more synaptic contacts onto the same dendrites, having shared histories of presynaptic and postsynaptic activity. The spine heads and neck diameters, but not neck lengths, of these pairs were nearly identical in size. We found that there is a minimum of 26 distinguishable synaptic strengths, corresponding to storing 4.7 bits of information at each synapse. Because of stochastic variability of synaptic activation the observed precision requires averaging activity over several minutes.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT
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Creative Commons Attribution
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.10778
