ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Superresolution imaging reveals activity-dependent plasticity of axon morphology linked to changes in action potential conduction velocity.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 81 papers.
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81 citing papers in PubMed, 144 citations in OpenAlex.
- Characterising the Diffusion Functional Signature of Negative BOLD With Interleaved TMS-fMRI in the Human Brain.Human brain mapping · 2026Article
- A high-resolution phenotypic screen identifies regulators of CNS axon diameter in zebrafish.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Presynaptic Vesicles Supply Membrane for Axonal Bouton Enlargement during Long Term Potentiation.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Mapping the spatiotemporal continuum of structural connectivity development across the human connectome in youth.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Complementarity of BOLD and ADC-fMRI in Mapping Brain Visual Processing in the Rat.NMR in biomedicine · 2026Article
- Daily ultrastructural remodeling of clock neurons.Current biology : CB · 2025Article
- The synaptic vesicle cluster as a controller of pre- and postsynaptic structure and function.The Journal of physiology · 2025Review
- Enhanced cycling of presynaptic vesicles during long-term potentiation in rat hippocampus.The Journal of physiology · 2025Review
- Geometry effects on protein mobility in a synapse.Biophysical journal · 2025Article
- Live STED imaging of functional neuroanatomy.Nature protocols · 2025Review
- Mapping grey and white matter activity in the human brain with isotropic ADC-fMRI.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Apparent Diffusion Coefficient fMRI shines light on white matter resting-state connectivity compared to BOLD.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Developmental axon diameter growth of central nervous system axons does not depend on ensheathment or myelination by oligodendrocytes.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Somatosensory-evoked response induces extensive diffusivity and kurtosis changes associated with neural activity in rodents.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Evaluating the dependence of ADC-fMRI on haemodynamics in breath-hold and resting-state conditions.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Membrane mechanics dictate axonal pearls-on-a-string morphology and function.Nature neuroscience · 2025Article
- Axons compensate for biophysical constraints of variable size to uniformize their action potentials.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Graphene Microelectrode Arrays, 4D Structured Illumination Microscopy, and a Machine Learning Spike Sorting Algorithm Permit the Analysis of Ultrastructural Neuronal Changes During Neuronal Signaling in a Model of Niemann-Pick Disease Type C.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2024Article
- Spike transmission failures in axons from cortical neuronsiScience · 2024Article
- Axonal neurotransmitter release in the regulation of myelination.Bioscience reports · 2024Review
21 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Axons convey information to nearby and distant cells, and the time it takes for action potentials (APs) to reach their targets governs the timing of information transfer in neural circuits. In the unmyelinated axons of hippocampus, the conduction speed of APs depends crucially on axon diameters, which vary widely. However, it is not known whether axon diameters are dynamic and regulated by activity-dependent mechanisms. Using time-lapse superresolution microscopy in brain slices, we report that axons grow wider after high-frequency AP firing: synaptic boutons undergo a rapid enlargement, which is mostly transient, whereas axon shafts show a more delayed and progressive increase in diameter. Simulations of AP propagation incorporating these morphological dynamics predicted bidirectional effects on AP conduction speed. The predictions were confirmed by electrophysiological experiments, revealing a phase of slowed down AP conduction, which is linked to the transient enlargement of the synaptic boutons, followed by a sustained increase in conduction speed that accompanies the axon shaft widening induced by high-frequency AP firing. Taken together, our study outlines a morphological plasticity mechanism for dynamically fine-tuning AP conduction velocity, which potentially has wide implications for the temporal transfer of information in the brain.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.