Redistribution of synaptic efficacy: A mechanism to generate infinite synaptic input diversity from a homogenous population of neurons without changing absolute synaptic efficacies

Abstract

Changing the reliability of neurotransmitter release results in a change in the efficay of low frequency synaptic transmission and in the rate of high frequency synaptic depression thus it can not cause an uniform change in strength of synapses and instead results in a change in the dynamics of synaptic transmission referred to as ‘redistribution of synaptic efficacy’ (RSE). Since the change in synaptic transmission associated with RSE depends on the history of action potential activity it is concluded that RSE serves as a mechanism to generate a potentially infinite diversity of synaptic input.