Under our experimental conditions, in which only one spine is stimulated, the generation of new spines was not observed
What causes the differences in reactions when stimulating one spine versus multiple? What about the relationships between the spines is the reason behind this?
In neurons subjected to whole-cell dialysis, we detected little structural plasticity
Is there a way in which we can subject a neuron to whole-cell dialysis without causing washout?
spine enlargement
Why is this? What would happen if LTP was still induced in the spines that did not show enlargement? Would they just not have any synaptic potentiation occurring?
Figure 2.
Enlargement was greater and longer-lasting in the smaller spines, and I’m wondering if this would change their response to stimulation at a later time (when their size is much larger than it was originally)? However, long-lasting enlargement was much higher in small spines than in large spines. This is super interesting. I would have thought that large spines would be easier to induce enlargement in than small ones. The fact that short-term enlargement occurred in all of the small spines and a large majority of the large spines indicates that the methods used were very effective, but is there a more impactful way that we could achieve higher levels of long-term enlargement, especially in larger spines? Would this improve the function of long-term memory?
thickness of 350 μm
Would different thicknesses of hippocampal slices cause variations in results?
depression
It would be amazing if there was a way to treat the cause of depression directly in the brain, either by increasing/decreasing potentiation.
For perforated-patch recordings, 1 mM MgCl2 was added to the extracellular solution and the concentration of CaCl2 was increased to 4 mM
What would occur if a different concentration of CaCl was added to the extracellular solution? Would it, for example, speed up or slow down the enlargement of spines if the concentration was increased/decreased?
given that we have now shown that small spines can be converted into larger spines, we suggest that spines act as memory units, with large spines being the physical traces of long-term memory. Consistent with this idea, we found that large spines are resistant to LTP, which is critical for information storage
This is crazy to think about, but it makes sense! Smaller spines can become larger spines, and these larger spines are involved in long-term memory which is much harder to be altered once it’s formed. It seems that short-term memory is much more prone to influence from outside factors, before it becomes a permanent, long-term memory or is cast out by the brain as unimportant information.