Abstract

Please join us for our fortnightly Computational Neuroscience journal club on Tuesday 31st October at 2pm UK time in the CBL seminar room, or online on zoom.

The title is ‘Behavioural timescale synaptic plasticity (BTSP)’, presented by Samuel Eckmann.

Zoom information: https://eng-cam.zoom.us/j/84204498431?pwd=Um1oU284b1YxWThObGw4ZU9XZitWdz09 Meeting ID: 842 0449 8431 Passcode: 684140

Summary:

Synaptic plasticity is thought to be the physical correlate of learning. However, despite decades of research, under what conditions synapses change their strengths and how this change relates to behavior remains controversial. In particular, the millisecond timescale required for spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) seems at odds with the learning of, e.g., associations on a timescale of seconds to minutes. In contrast, a recently introduced experimental paradigm induces ‘behavioral timescale synaptic plasticity’ (BTSP); strengthening synapses between neurons that fire seconds apart. I will first give an introduction to STDP , highlighting some of the biological complexities that challenge its usefulness as a general theory of synaptic plasticity [1, 2]. Finally, I will present the BTSP paradigm [3], including recent findings of BTSP in hippocampus area CA3 [4].

[1] Lisman, J., & Spruston, N. (2010). Questions about STDP as a general model of synaptic plasticity. Frontiers in synaptic neuroscience, 2, 140. [2] O’Donnell, C. (2023). Nonlinear slow-timescale mechanisms in synaptic plasticity. Current opinion in neurobiology, 82, 102778. [3] Bittner, K. C., Milstein, A. D., Grienberger, C., Romani, S., & Magee, J. C. (2017). Behavioral time scale synaptic plasticity underlies CA1 place fields. Science, 357(6355), 1033-1036. [4] Li, Y., Briguglio, J., Romani, S., & Magee, J. C. (2023). Mechanisms of memory storage and retrieval in hippocampal area CA3 . bioRxiv, 2023.