Small-conductance calcium-activated potassium channels activated by action potentials suppress EPSPs and gate spike-timing dependent synaptic plasticity
- Australian National University, Australia
Abstract
Small conductance calcium-activated potassium channels (SK channels) are present in spines and can be activated by backpropagating action potentials (APs). This suggests they may play a critical role in spike-timing dependent synaptic plasticity (STDP). Consistent with this idea, EPSPs in both cortical and hippocampal pyramidal neurons were suppressed by preceding APs in an SK-dependent manner. In cortical pyramidal neurons EPSP suppression by preceding APs depended on their precise timing as well as the distance of activated synapses from the soma, was dendritic in origin, and involved SK-dependent suppression of NMDA receptor activation. As a result SK channel activation by backpropagating APs gated STDP induction during low-frequency AP-EPSP pairing, with both LTP and LTD absent under control conditions but present after SK channel block. These findings indicate that activation of SK channels in spines by backpropagating APs plays a key role in regulating both EPSP amplitude and STDP induction.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Australian Research Council
- Greg J Stuart
National Health and Medical Research Council
- Greg J Stuart
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Marlene Bartos, University of Freiburg, Germany
Ethics
Animal experimentation: This research was performed according to guidelines approved by the Animal Experimentation Ethics Committee of the Australian National University (Animal ethics protocol number A2014_63).
Version history
- Received: July 11, 2017
- Accepted: October 22, 2017
- Accepted Manuscript published: October 23, 2017 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: November 9, 2017 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2017, Jones et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Small-conductance calcium-activated potassium channels activated by action potentials suppress EPSPs and gate spike-timing dependent synaptic plasticity
eLife 6:e30333.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.30333
