Switching Off and On of Synaptic Sites at<i>Aplysia</i>Sensorimotor Synapses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using the highly plastic synapses between mechanoreceptor sensory neurons and siphon motor neurons of Aplysia as a model, we have investigated whether switching off and on of individual synaptic release sites is a strategy that is used by neurons in forms of short-term synaptic modulation with a time course of minutes to hours. We have modified some of the techniques of classical quantal analysis and examined the kinetics of synaptic depression under different stimulation protocols to answer this question. Our analysis shows that both synaptic depression caused by homosynaptic activity and synaptic facilitation induced by an endogenous facilitatory transmitter occur by means of the shutting off and turning on, respectively, of synaptic sites, without intermediate changes in the probability of release. Our findings imply that other forms of plasticity at these synapses, such as post-tetanic potentiation, long-term facilitation, and long-term potentiation, are also expressed by all-or-none changes in activity at individual sites. We thus show that in addition to the mechanisms of synaptic integration that are known to operate in single cells and networks, neurons can exercise a further layer of fine control, at the level of individual release sites.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".