First author Wei-Chung Allen Lee and colleagues detected the structural plasticity when they used the powerful resolution of the two-photon microscope to visualize individual neurons inside the brains of 4- to 6-week-old living mice. Focusing their objectives on layer 2/3 of the visual cortex, they were surprised to see that all was not static. Images taken from exactly the same place, but at different times, revealed that dendrites, those arborlike branches that receive input from other neurons, appeared and disappeared with regularity.

Lee and colleagues monitored six pyramidal cells (named because of their shape) and eight nonpyramidal cells for three to 10 weeks. They found that each of the nonpyramidal cells had at least one, and as many as seven dynamic dendrite tips. In one neuron, four of 28 dendrite tips examined changed length. One of these branches extended by 16 μM over a 4-week period, while another extended by about 10 μM. In another nonpyramidal neuron, a single dendrite extended out of the field of view of the microscope. From age 11 to 13 weeks, that dendrite grew more than 90 μM. Overall, the authors found that about 14 percent (35 out of 259) of monitored dendrites grew (3 percent), retracted (2 percent), or did both (9 percent). By contrast, none of the 124 monitored pyramidal dendrites were dynamic, however, leaving the authors to conclude that “while dendritic branches of pyramidal cells remain stable, nonpyramidal interneurons in these layers are dynamic, exhibiting a range of structural changes on a week-to-week basis.” The authors found that the interneurons in question were γ-aminobutyric acid-, or GABAergic inhibitory neurons.

While this data indicates that the dendritic arbor can undergo spontaneous remodeling, the overall changes are small—only 1 to 5 percent of the total length of the dendritic arbor. This may explain why previous studies on remodeling have been inconsistent (for a review, see Chklovskii et al., 2004), but more importantly, it also raises questions of functional significance. “The functional test is a very hard one to pass,” said Karel Svoboda at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. He and other researchers, including Wen-Biao Gan at New York University School of Medicine, work to address this issue by looking at the dynamics of neuronal spines, which harbor the synapses that many neurons use to communicate with each other. Using this method, both groups have shown that spines turn over in pyramidal neurons of the cortex in response to stimuli. Using electron microscopy, Svoboda’s lab also showed that these spines do have synapses (see ARF related news story). Both groups also reported early last year that, though there are both persistent and transient spines in the pyramidal neurons of adult mice, the spines become more stable as the animals age (see Holtmaat et al., 2005 and Zuo et al., 2005). Many nonpyramidal dendrites do not contain spines. Despite this, Lee and colleagues were able to monitor the spines on one neuron, finding them to be motile. However, it is not clear if any new spines formed, or if any existing spines disappeared during the growth and retraction of the dendrites.—Tom Fagan.

Reference:
Allen Lee W-C, Huang H, Feng G, Sanes JR, Brown EN, So PT, Nedivi E. Dynamic remodeling of dendritic arbors in GABAergic interneurons of adult visual cortex. PLoS Biology. February 2006;4:e29. Abstract