Abstract
The common approach in morphological analysis of dendritic spines of mammalian neuronal cells is to categorize spines into subpopulations based on whether they are stubby, mushroom, thin, or filopodia shaped. The corresponding cellular models of synaptic plasticity, long-term potentiation, and long-term depression associate the synaptic strength with either spine enlargement or spine shrinkage. Although a variety of automatic spine segmentation and feature extraction methods were developed recently, no approaches allowing for an automatic and unbiased distinction between dendritic spine subpopulations and detailed computational models of spine behavior exist. We propose an automatic and statistically based method for the unsupervised construction of spine shape taxonomy based on arbitrary features. The taxonomy is then utilized in the newly introduced computational model of behavior, which relies on transitions between shapes. Models of different populations are compared using supplied bootstrap-based statistical tests. We compared two populations of spines at two time points. The first population was stimulated with long-term potentiation, and the other in the resting state was used as a control. The comparison of shape transition characteristics allowed us to identify the differences between population behaviors. Although some extreme changes were observed in the stimulated population, statistically significant differences were found only when whole models were compared. The source code of our software is freely available for non-commercial use1. Contact: d.plewczynski@cent.uw.edu.pl.
Highlights
Brain plasticity depends on the functional and structural reorganization of the synapses
The majority of the excitatory synapses are located on dendritic spines, which are small membranous protrusions localized on the surface of neuronal dendrites
We identified three representative spines lying nearest to the cluster center
Summary
Brain plasticity depends on the functional and structural reorganization of the synapses. The size of the spine head is proportional to the postsynaptic density area and correlates with the postsynaptic receptor content and synaptic strength (Nusser et al, 1998; Kharazia and Weinberg, 1999; Takumi et al, 1999). The dendritic spine shape has been accepted for determining the strength of the synaptic connections and is thought to underlie the processes of information coding and memory storage in the brain. Alterations in dendritic spine shape, size, and density are associated with a number of brain disorders (DeKosky and Scheff, 1990; Irwin et al, 2001; Selemon et al, 2006; Knobloch and Mansuy, 2008; Sweet et al, 2008; Hutsler and Zhang, 2010; Penzes et al, 2011; Levenga and Willemsen, 2012)
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