Nanoconnectomic upper bound on the variability of synaptic plasticity

Introduction

Synapses on the same dendrite that receive input from the same axon are the same size. — Separate boutons of a single Schaffer collateral axon making synaptic contact with two dendritic spines (arrows) originating on the same dendrite of a CA1 pyramidal neuron. The spine head volumes, neck diameters (but not neck lengths), PSD areas, and number of docked vesicles of these two synapses are almost identical.

Provided here are the data and software described in the article entitled "Nanoconnectomic upper bound on the variability of synaptic plasticity", published in eLife.

Downloads

Reconstructions

The gzipped tar file suppfiles.tar.gz contains the annotated 3D reconstructions and final reduced datasets described in the article. For more details about how the data were collected and analyzed, please refer to the article.

The 3D reconstructions are provided as Blender files. These files were annotated and analyzed, and the final reduced datasets were generated using the NeuropilTools addon provided below.

To extract the contents of gzipped tar file, issue the command:
tar zxvf suppfiles.tar.gz which will create a folder named suppfiles in the current directory.

Neuropil Tools

NeuropilTools is the Blender addon created to segment, annotate, and analyze the spines in the 3D reconstructions. You can checkout a copy with the command:
git clone git://github.com/mcellteam/neuropil_tools.git