Collateral branch connections of axons are issued during development to ensure that all potential postsynaptic targets are covered. However, the exact cellular mechanisms underlying the pruning of inappropriate connections continue to elude developmental neuro-scientists.Writing in The Journal of Neuroscience, Liu, Low and colleagues shed light on how these connections are eliminated. It takes hundreds of thousands of synaptic connections to create the intricate circuitry of the CNS, and, to ensure that all synaptic targets are covered, some of the early connections are imprecise and axonal projections are often too long. How this rough draft of the CNS is subsequently refined is still not fully understood, but it seems that different neuronal populations use various processes to prune and remodel axons.
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