21 papers · ranked by Valyu relevance
María Jesús Ramírez-Expósito, Cristina Cueto-Ureña, José Manuel Martínez-Martos, Paschalis Theotokis
Neuronal synapses are the functional units of communication in the central nervous system. This review describes the molecular mechanisms regulating synaptic transmission, plasticity, and circuit refinement. At the presynaptic active zone, scaffolding proteins including bassoon, piccolo, RIMs, and munc13 organize…
Takeshi Kaizuka, Zhen Qiu, Edita Bulovaite, Katie Morris + 7 more
How biological complexity emerges from the ordered assembly of molecular building blocks into supramolecular systems remains a central question, particularly in the mammalian brain with its vast synaptic diversity. We introduce NanoSYNMAP, a genetic, optical, and computational platform that integrates FRET with…
Keyaa Dilip Shah, Yonghong Zhang
Calcium signaling in neuronal cells is the principal mechanism underlying learning and synaptic plasticity, whereas the postsynaptic density (PSD) is an important center where calcium-dependent processes are organized and regulated. This review explores the roles of calmodulin (CaM) in facilitating calcium-dependent…
Yina Wei, Yuze Liu, Feng Xiong, Fuhui Long + 1 more
Synapses are fundamental units of neural computation and structural plasticity in the brain, yet their brain-wide spatial organization in mammals remains largely unknown. Building on our previous mapping and modeling of dendritic spines and axonal boutons, we developed a statistical approach to generate over 17.99…
Michael W Reimann, Sirio Bolaños-Puchet, Jean-Denis Courcol, Daniela Egas Santander + 41 more
The function of the neocortex is fundamentally determined by its repeating microcircuit motif, but also by its rich, interregional connectivity. We present a data-driven computational model of the anatomy of non-barrel primary somatosensory cortex of juvenile rat, integrating whole-brain scale data while providing…
Zubaer Ibna Mannan, Sami Azam, Ram Kaji Budhathoki, MD Nur Alam + 1 more
Title: Graphical abstract A neuromemristive synapse is developed that can emulate both homo- and heterosynaptic plasticity, showcasing the homeostatic and modular input-dependent roles of heterosynaptic plasticity, along with homosynaptic long-term and short-term potentiation and depression, and functioning effectively…
Natalí Barros-Zulaica, Daniela Egas Santander, Lida Kanari, Ying Shi + 8 more
Comparative studies have established differences between the electrophysiology and anatomy of human and rodent cortical circuits. A consistent finding is that human neuronal morphologies display more elaborate neurite shapes than those of rodents, a feature that cannot be accounted for merely by their larger size…
Berke Ozgur Arslan, Ismail Akturk, Neslihan Serap Sengor, Onur Alpturk
In this work, we develop a mathematical model that captures both the early and late phases of Long-Term Potentiation (LTP) and Long-Term Depression (LTD) within an NMDAR-dependent and AMPA-regulated framework. The model combines multiple essential properties. First, it emphasizes a detailed representation of…
Jaeho Seol
AI researchers describe state-of-the-art models as one thing repeated at scale: the Transformer, wired identically for text, pixels, or speech. Neuroscientists describe the cortex as a mosaic - dense Layer 4 in visual cortex for spatial encoding, thick Layers 5/6 in motion cortex for temporal integration - different…
Ido Aizenbud, David Beniaguev, Noam Pnueli, Idan Segev + 1 more
Cortical pyramidal neurons possess elaborate dendritic trees with diverse nonlinear membrane conductances and thousands of plastic synapses, suggesting substantial computational capabilities at the single-cell level. Yet, what can a neuron compute remains an open question, largely due to the lack of a systematic…
Victor J. Barranca
Recent experiments have revealed that the inter-regional connectivity of the cerebral cortex exhibits strengths spanning over several orders of magnitude and decaying with distance. We demonstrate this to be a fundamental organizing feature that fosters high complexity in both connectivity structure and network…
Gouri Lakshmi S, Athira Chandrasekharan, Harshit Kumar, Muhammed Sahad E + 2 more
Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity (STDP) provides a biologically grounded learning rule for spiking neural networks (SNNs), but its reliance on precise spike timing and pairwise updates limits fast learning of weights. We introduce a supervised extension of Spike Agreement-Dependent Plasticity (SADP), which replaces…
Seyed Sadra Ghavami, Mohammad Hossein Nikkhah, Mohammad Rasoul Roshanshah, Saeed Safari
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a brain-inspired path toward highly efficient computation, but their practical deployment is constrained by the challenge of managing and executing their massive parallelism on physical hardware. This problem mirrors the historical challenge in processor design of moving beyond…
Aaron Spieler, Georg Martius, Anna Levina
Cortical neurons are complex, multi-timescale processors wired into recurrent circuits, shaped by long evolutionary pressure under stringent biological constraints. Mainstream machine learning, by contrast, predominantly builds models from extremely simple units, a default inherited from early neural-network theory. We…
Xundong Wu, Pengfei Zhao, Zilin Yu, Lei Ma + 6 more
Title: Summary Why have modern artificial neural networks not adopted the nonlinear dendritic structures found in biological brain cells, and what is the core advantage of such active dendritic units? While early studies suggested that dendritic nonlinearities can enhance learning capabilities by boosting capacity, we…
Authors not listed
TIMP2 (Tissue Inhibitor of Metalloproteinase-2) plays a crucial role in hippocampal neuroplasticity and cognitive function through MMP-independent signaling. Despite its therapeutic promise, TIMP2 has long been considered 'undruggable' due to its cryptic surface topology and lack of canonical active sites. We present a…
Daniel Trpevski, Jeanette Hellgren Kotaleski, Matthias Hennig
Inhibitory synapses can control a neuron’s firing rate and also control supralinear dendritic integration. It is not known how inhibitory synapses can learn to perform these functions using only signals available locally at the synaptic site. We study an inhibitory plasticity rule based on the Bienenstock-Cooper-Munro…
Authors not listed
Acetylcholine (ACh) is a key neurotransmitter involved in cognitive function, motor control, and synaptic modulation, yet its electrochemical inactivity and the rapid kinetics of exocytosis have hindered real-time quantal detection. Previous micrometer-scale enzymatic ACh biosensors enabled sub-millisecond…
Authors not listed
Generating novel, drug-like molecules with realistic synthetic pathways is an essential goal in computer-aided drug discovery, yet generative models often lack synthesis awareness, resulting in compounds that are difficult or impossible to produce. To overcome this limitation, models must optimize not only molecular…
Authors not listed
Membrane fusion underpins many fundamental cellular processes, yet the design of artificial fusogens that can interact with specific cell surface markers in a precise and predictable manner remains a major challenge. Here we demonstrate that cholera toxin B-subunit (CTB), a naturally occurring glycolipid-binding…
Elliot M. Butterworth, Tim Rogers, Matthew A. Wills
Attempts to quantify biological complexity often consider intrinsic structural properties at a chosen hierarchical level and resolution, such as counts of body parts and their degree of differentiation. These measures are inherently \emph{syntactic}, being concerned with the information needed to specify an arrangement…