Imperial College London
Alternate

Professor Claudia Clopath

Faculty of Engineering, Department of Bioengineering

Professor of Computational Neuroscience
 
 
 
//

Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 1435c.clopath Website

 
 
//

Location

 

Royal School of Mines 4.09Royal School of MinesSouth Kensington Campus

//

Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Sweeney:2016:10.1111/ejn.13279,
author = {Sweeney, Y and Clopath, C},
doi = {10.1111/ejn.13279},
journal = {European Journal of Neuroscience},
title = {Emergent spatial synaptic structure from diffusive plasticity},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ejn.13279},
year = {2016}
}
Download

RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - Some neurotransmitters can diffuse freely across cell membranes, influencing neighbouring neurons regardless of their synaptic coupling. This provides a means of neural communication, alternative to synaptic transmission, which can influence the way in which neural networks process information. Here, we ask whether diffusive neurotransmission can also influence the structure of synaptic connectivity in a network undergoing plasticity. We propose a form of Hebbian synaptic plasticity which is mediated by a diffusive neurotransmitter. Whenever a synapse is modified at an individual neuron through our proposed mechanism, similar but smaller modifications occur in synapses connecting to neighbouring neurons. The effects of this diffusive plasticity are explored in networks of rate-based neurons. This leads to the emergence of spatial structure in the synaptic connectivity of the network. We show that this spatial structure can coexist with other forms of structure in the synaptic connectivity, such as with groups of strongly interconnected neurons that form in response to correlated external drive. Finally, we explore diffusive plasticity in a simple feedforward network model of receptive field development. We show that, as widely observed across sensory cortex, the preferred stimulus identity of neurons in our network become spatially correlated due to diffusion. Our proposed mechanism of diffusive plasticity provides an efficient mechanism for generating these spatial correlations in stimulus preference which can flexibly interact with other forms of synaptic organisation.
AU  - Sweeney,Y
AU  - Clopath,C
DO  - 10.1111/ejn.13279
PY  - 2016///
SN  - 1460-9568
TI  - Emergent spatial synaptic structure from diffusive plasticity
T2  - European Journal of Neuroscience
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ejn.13279
UR  - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27206794
ER  -
Download