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REVIEW article

Front. Neural Circuits
Volume 19 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fncir.2025.1541926
This article is part of the Research Topic Inducing Lifelong Plasticity (iPlasticity) by Brain Rejuvenation: Elucidation and Manipulation of Critical Period Mechanisms View all 11 articles

Activity-dependent synaptic competition and dendrite pruning in developing mitral cells

Provisionally accepted
Takeshi Imai Takeshi Imai 1,2*
  • 1 Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan
  • 2 Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    During the early postnatal period, neurons in sensory circuits dynamically remodel their connectivity to acquire discrete receptive fields. Neuronal activity is thought to play a central role in circuit remodeling during this period: Neuronal activity stabilizes some synaptic connections while eliminating others. Synaptic competition plays a central role in the binary choice between stabilization and elimination. While activity-dependent "punishment signals" propagating from winner to loser synapses have been hypothesized to drive synapse elimination, their exact nature has remained elusive. In this review, I summarize recent studies in mouse mitral cells that explain how only one dendrite is stabilized while others are eliminated, based on early postnatal spontaneous activity in the olfactory bulb. I discuss how the hypothetical punishment signals act on loser but not winner dendrites to establish only one primary dendrite per mitral cell, the anatomical basis for the odorant receptor-specific parallel information processing in the olfactory bulb.

    Keywords: synapse elimination, Synaptic competition, Dendrite pruning, mitral cell, Olfactory Bulb, spontaneous activity, NMDA receptor, RhoA

    Received: 09 Dec 2024; Accepted: 10 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Imai. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Takeshi Imai, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.