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The paper
S. Holler et al., “Structure and function of a neocortical synapse,” Nature, doi:10.1038/s41586-020-03134-2, 2021.
Brain cells use a language of neurotransmitters to pass messages to each other at junctions called synapses. A single neuron can have tens of thousands of synapses, allowing it to talk to thousands of other brain cells. These connections mediate information flow through the brain, and the plasticity of synapse strength is thought to underlie memory, learning, and other forms of cognition. Researchers have long suspected that synapses with greater surface areas are stronger, but have lacked experimental evidence for this, says Gregor Schuhknecht, a neuroscience postdoc at Harvard University.
To answer this question, Schuhknecht, then a graduate student at the Institute of Neuroinformatics at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, and his colleagues identified synapses between neuron pairs in the neocortex region of mouse brain slices. When an electrical ...
