Department of Neuroscience, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT 06510, USA.
Kavli Institute for Neuroscience, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06510, USA.
Science. 2024 Aug 16;385(6710):eadh7814. doi: 10.1126/science.adh7814.
Spontaneous activity refines neural connectivity prior to the onset of sensory experience, but it remains unclear how such activity instructs axonal connectivity with subcellular precision. We simultaneously measured spontaneous retinal waves and the activity of individual retinocollicular axons and tracked morphological changes in axonal arbors across hours in vivo in neonatal mice. We demonstrate that the correlation of an axon branch's activity with neighboring axons or postsynaptic neurons predicts whether the branch will be added, stabilized, or eliminated. Desynchronizing individual axons from their local networks, changing the pattern of correlated activity, or blocking -methyl-d-aspartate receptors all significantly altered single-axon morphology. These observations provide the first direct evidence in vivo that endogenous patterns of correlated neuronal activity instruct fine-scale refinement of axonal processes.
自发性活动在感官体验开始之前对神经连接进行了细化，但目前尚不清楚这种活动如何以亚细胞精度指导轴突连接。我们同时测量了新生小鼠体内数小时内的自发视网膜波和单个视交叉轴突的活动，并跟踪了轴突树突的形态变化。我们证明，轴突分支的活动与邻近轴突或突触后神经元的相关性可以预测该分支是会增加、稳定还是消除。使单个轴突与其局部网络去同步、改变相关活动的模式或阻断 -甲基-d-天冬氨酸受体都会显著改变单轴突形态。这些观察结果提供了体内的首个直接证据，证明内源性相关神经元活动模式指导了轴突过程的精细细化。
