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Updated: Aug 9, 2026

Presynaptically Silent Synapses Studied with Light Microscopy
Published on: January 4, 2010
Activity-dependent synaptic competition and dendrite pruning in developing mitral cells
1Department of Developmental Neurophysiology, Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan.
Abstract:
During the early postnatal period, neurons in sensory circuits dynamically remodel their connectivity to acquire discrete receptive fields. Neuronal activity is thought to play a central role in circuit remodeling during this period: Neuronal activity stabilizes some synaptic connections while eliminating others. Synaptic competition plays a central role in the binary choice between stabilization and elimination. While activity-dependent "punishment signals" propagating from winner to loser synapses have been hypothesized to drive synapse elimination, their exact nature has remained elusive. In this review, I summarize recent studies in mouse mitral cells that explain how only one dendrite is stabilized while others are eliminated, based on early postnatal spontaneous activity in the olfactory bulb. I discuss how the hypothetical punishment signals act on loser but not winner dendrites to establish only one primary dendrite per mitral cell, the anatomical basis for the odorant receptor-specific parallel information processing in the olfactory bulb.
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