Journal club

Karen picked the famous paper from Kasai's lab.
Matsuzaki M, Honkura N, Ellis-Davies GC, Kasai H
"Structural basis of long-term potentiation in single dendritic spines" Nature. 2004 429(6993):761-6
This is a beautiful paper showing glutamate uncaging around a single spine increases the size of the stimulated spine as well as AMPA receptors on the spines. We discussed about following points: i) Is the structural change occur parallel to LTP? What is the physiological meaning of the structure change. (Unpublished data from other groups suggest LTP and structural changes are parallel events.) ii) This paper has shown for the first time that LTP can be induced in a single spine by glutamate puffing. However, their physiology data are weak. iii) Background spine moveoments are very small (We usually see dynamic spine movements in these ages). iv) Their spines are huge. Electron microscope studies and our optical data have shown the mean size of spines in CA1 neurons is ~0.06 uL³, and spines larger than ~0.3 uL³ rarely exist.
[Comments]