Synapses and dendritic spines in health and disease

BARRANTES FJ

JOURNAL OF NEUROCHEMISTRY

WILEY-BLACKWELL PUBLISHING, INC

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2012 vol. 122 p. 4 - 4

0022-3042

The 2012 5th ISN Special Conference in Buenos Aires on “Synapses and dendritic spines in health and disease” focuses on a rapidly moving topic at the forefront of the Neurosciences.   The dendrites of neurons receive and incorporate input from thousands of partner cells. The majority of the incoming informational traffic occurs at highly specialized called synapses that are distributed all over the dendritic branching of the input neuron. Improper function and/or abnormal regulation of synaptic transmission is implicated in a wide variety of psychiatric diseases and other disorders of the CNS. Perturbation of neurotransmission has been associated with the pathophysiology of diseases ranging from schizophrenia and autism to epilepsy and addiction, and increasing evidence suggests that synapses are among the earliest targets in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's and other CNS diseases.    Understanding the complexity of synapse fine structure and structure-function relationships currently involves examining molecular topography in live cells.  New high-resolution, high-speed imaging techniques are being developed and applied to cultured neurons and even live animals to examine the temporal domain and spatial features of the molecular events at individual, living synapses.  It is highly likely that we shall witness enormous advances in these exquisitely refined analytical techniques in the near future. However powerful, these techniques still fall short of unraveling the integrative aspects of synaptic ensembles and neuronal networks, which call for emerging approaches to understanding normal brain function and disease conditions.   By focusing on the synapse and synaptopathies, the 2012 ISN Special Conference aims at providing a glimpse of the molecular and cellular substrates of complex high-order brain functions and their alterations in disease.