The single dendritic branch as a fundamental functional unit in the nervous system.

Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research and Department of Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK. t.branco@ucl.ac.uk

Current opinion in neurobiology 2010 Aug

filter terms:

The conventional view of dendritic function is that dendrites collect synaptic input and deliver it to the soma. This view has been challenged in recent years by new results demonstrating that dendrites can act as independent processing and signalling units, performing local computations that are then broadcast to the rest of the neuron, or to other neurons via dendritic transmitter and neuromodulator release. Here we describe these findings and discuss the notion that the single dendritic branch may represent a fundamental unit of signalling in the mammalian nervous system. This view proposes that the dendritic branch is a basic organizational unit for integrating synaptic input, implementing synaptic and homeostatic plasticity, and controlling local cellular processes such as protein translation. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Citation

Tiago Branco, Michael Häusser. The single dendritic branch as a fundamental functional unit in the nervous system. Current opinion in neurobiology. 2010 Aug;20(4):494-502