Neuronal Regulation: A Mechanism for Synaptic Pruning During Brain Maturation

摘要

Human and animal studies show that mammalian brains undergo mas- sive synaptic pruning during childhood, losing about half of the synapses by puberty. We have previously shown that maintaining the network performance while synapses are deleted requires that synapses be prop- erly modified and pruned, with the weaker synapses removed. We now show that neuronal regulation, a mechanism recently observed to main- tain the average neuronal input field of a postsynaptic neuron, results in a weight-dependent synaptic modification.