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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access first published online on February 24, 2009
This version published online on April 10, 2009
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp012
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© 2009 The Authors
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Experience-Dependent, Rapid Structural Changes in Hippocampal Pyramidal Cell Spines

Takuma Kitanishi1, Yuji Ikegaya1,2, Norio Matsuki1 and Maki K. Yamada1,2,3

1 Laboratory of Chemical Pharmacology, Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan, 2 PRESTO/Sakigake, Japan Science and Technology Agency, Saitama 332-0012, Japan

Address correspondence to email: makiky-tky{at}umin.ac.jp.

Morphological changes in dendritic spines may contribute to the fine tuning of neural network connectivity. The relationship between spine morphology and experience-dependent neuronal activity, however, is largely unknown. In the present study, we combined 2 histological analyses to examine this relationship: 1) Measurement of spines of neurons whose morphology was visualized in brain sections of mice expressing membrane-targeted green florescent protein (Thy1-mGFP mice) and 2) Categorization of CA1 neurons by immunohistochemical monitoring of Arc expression as a putative marker of recent neuronal activity. After mice were exposed to a novel, enriched environment for 60 min, neurons that expressed Arc had fewer small spines and more large spines than Arc-negative cells. These differences were not observed when the exploration time was shortened to 15 min. This net-balanced structural change is consistent with both synapse-specific enhancement and suppression. These results provide the first evidence of rapid morphological changes in spines that were preferential to a subset of neurons in association with an animal's experiences.

Key Words: behavior • hippocampus • immediate-early gene • plasticity • sparse coding • spine dynamics

3 Current address: PRESTO/Sakigake, Department of Cellular Neurobiology, Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-0033

A current address was added for K. Yamada.


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