Topic: long-term potentiation

Sleep strongly affects synaptic strength, making it critical for cognition, especially learning and memory formation. Whether and how sleep deprivation modulates human brain physiology and cognition is poorly understood. Here we examined how overnight sleep deprivation vs overnight sufficient sleep affects (a) cortical excitability, measured by transcranial magnetic stimulation, (b) inducibility of long-term potentiation (LTP)- and long-term depression (LTD)-like plasticity via transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), and (c) learning, memory, and attention. We found that sleep deprivat

The David Smith Lectures in Anatomical Neuropharmacology, Part of the 'Pharmacology, Anatomical Neuropharmacology and Drug Discovery Seminars Series', Department of Pharmacology, University of Oxford. The 15th David Smith Award Lecture in Anatomical Neuropharmacology will be delivered by Professor Tim Bliss, Visiting Professor at UCL and the Frontier Institutes of Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University, China, and is hosted by Professor Nigel Emptage. This award lecture was set up to celebrate the vision of Professor A David Smith, namely, that explanations of the action of drugs on

Ever since Bliss and Lømo discovered the phenomenon of long-term potentiation (LTP) in rabbit dentate gyrus in the 1960s, Hebb’s rule—neurons that fire together wire together—gained popularity to explain learning and memory. Accumulating evidence, however, suggests that neural activity is homeostatically regulated. Homeostatic mechanisms are mostly interpreted to stabilize network dynamics. However, recent theoretical work has shown that linking the activity of a neuron to its connectivity within the network provides a robust alternative implementation of Hebb’s rule, although entirely based o

Sensory experience and perceptual learning changes receptive field properties of cortical pyramidal neurons possibly mediated by long-term potentiation (LTP) of synapses. We have previously shown in the mouse somatosensory cortex (S1) that sensory-driven LTP in layer (L) 2/3 pyramidal neurons is dependent on higher order thalamic feedback from the posteromedial nucleus (POm), which is thought to convey contextual information from various cortical regions integrated with sensory input. We have followed up on this work by dissecting the cortical microcircuitry that underlies this form of LTP

Understanding the fine-scale connectivity structure of neural networks is key to deciphering their behaviour. Motifs in network connectivity are instrumental in relating circuit structure to dynamical properties of neural activity, such as covariability and dimensionality [1]. Experiments have made significant progress in measuring precise neural connectivity: multi-patch experiments, as well as more recent studies in connectomics, have found that certain types of three-neuron (triplet) connectivity motifs are over- or underrepresented relative to chance (Fig.1A, [2,3]). However, it is still u

Among the brain structures affected in Schizophrenia is the hippocampus. In addition to structural changes [1], dysfunctions of the synaptic plasticity have also been observed supporting cognitive impairment [2]. To study these phenomena in depth, we aim to develop and match two models of the pathology, computational and experimental. Our work is based on an existing computational hippocampus model [3] and a 3-hits mouse model [4]. For that purpose, we analyze electrophysiological signals recorded with Multi-Electrode Array (MEA) on hippocampal slices to extract synaptic transmission character