Short-term synaptic plasticity reflects the recent history of synaptic inputs and directly influences information processing in a neural network. Different forms of facilitation and depression of transmission following doublet or train stimulations, lasting tens to hundreds of milliseconds, have been demonstrated over the last four decades. However, there is still no consensus on the precise aetiology of the underlying mechanisms. In a recent issue of The Journal of Physiology, the article by Bornschein et al. (2013), nicely combines state of the art electrophysiological and two-photon imaging techniques to tackle the origin of a very short-term facilitation (5-10 ms time course) observed at the cerebellar Purkinje cell recurrent collateral-Purkinje cell synapse (Orduz & Llano, 2007).
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