Excitatory synaptic interaction on the dendritic tree

Abstract

A neuron in the Central Nervous System receives thousands of synaptic inputs arriving both from close and long distance neurons. Synaptic activity modulates the electrical potential of the neuronal membrane producing an output which is regulated by a threshold mechanism. The crossing of the threshold produces a sequence of spikes which, very likely, is the neural representation of the stimulus. Dendrites usually receive the larger amount of synaptic inputs and their role in synaptic integration and code formation in the single neuron cannot be neglected. In the present paper, the mutual interaction of a couple of excitatory synapses connected to the same, terminal, dendritic trunk will be analyzed and some aspects of the computational ability of the "dendritic machinery" will be discussed. © 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.