Topic: inter-synaptic competition

Site-specific synaptic plasticity modifying the strength of a particular, individual synapse is critical to cognitive functions such as memory and learning (Kastellakis et al., 2019; Tazerart et al., 2020). This specificity coexists with the experimental observation that the dendrite-wide spine sizes and weights follow a surprisingly stable, lognormal-like distribution (Hasan et al. 2020; Eggl et al., 2023). How synaptic plasticity can be specific, yet the global synapse distribution stable, is an open question that has motivated several recent studies (Kirschner et al., 2019; Eggl et al., 202