(1)From: K C Cheng
Reply-To: kccheng@idirect.com
Organization:http://www.kccheng.org

Newsgroups: bionet.neuroscience
To: Richard Rolfe
Subject: Re: Sensory perception (neurobiology query)

Richard Rolfe wrote:
>
> 1. Are action potentials ever transmitted along dendrites or only along
> axons?

> Thanks,
>
> Rik
Re the 1st: action potentials are surely transmitted along dendrites as
well. Lots of literature on this. Sorry, I'm too busy etc. right now to
find and quote them for you. But try the huge American Physiological
Society Handbook, volumes on neurons.
kccheng
http://webhome.idirect.com/~kccheng

(2)From: hdvorak@cns.caltech.edu (Hannah Dvorak-Carbone)
Newsgroups: bionet.neuroscience
Subject: Re: Sensory perception (neurobiology query)
Date: 21 Aug 1998 16:46:22 GMT
Organization: Caltech Biology

In article <35DC306F.5BF9@no.spam.thanks.oitunix.oit.umass.edu>,
edh@no.spam.thanks.oitunix.oit.umass.edu says...
>
>K C Cheng wrote:
>> Re the 1st: action potentials are surely transmitted along dendrites as
>> well. Lots of literature on this. Sorry, I'm too busy etc. right now to
>> find and quote them for you. But try the huge American Physiological
>> Society Handbook, volumes on neurons.
>
>I think you're confusing action potentials with postsynaptic
>potentials. [rest - accurate but incomplete - snipped]

Action potentials, while usually initiated in the soma or the initial segment
of the axon, can propagate up into the dendrites, thanks to the
voltage-dependent sodium channels found there.

See: Johnston, D., Magee, J.C., Colbert, C.M., and Christie, B.R. Active
properties of neuronal dendrites. Annu. Rev. Neurosci. 19:165-186, 1996,
for a good review of the active properties of dendrites.

Examples of the possible role of back-propagating action potentials in synaptic
plasticity are:

Magee, J.C., and Johnston, D. A synaptically controlled, associative signal for
Hebbian plasticity in hippocampal neurons. Science 275:209-213, 1997, and

Markram, H., Lubke, J., Frotscher, M., and Sakmann, B. Regulation of synaptic
efficacy by coincidence of postsynaptic APs and EPSPs. Science 275:213-215,
1997.

(Please do not take the use of the term "back-propagating" to mean that this
mechanism could be used to implement back-propagation learning algorithms in
artificial neural networks. This is something different.)-

Hannah Dvorak-Carbone

(3)From: Terrence Brannon
Newsgroups: bionet.neuroscience
Subject: Re: Sensory perception (neurobiology query)
Organization: Laboratory for Neural Computation
Sender: brannon@kelp.usc.edu

To: richard.rolfe@bbsrc.ac.uk (Richard Rolfe)

richard.rolfe@bbsrc.ac.uk (Richard Rolfe) writes:

: 1. Are action potentials ever transmitted along dendrites or only along
: axons?

Yes, see

@Article{Schwindt_Crill98,
author = {P.C. Schwindt and W.E. Crill},
title = {Synaptically Evoked Dendritic Action Potentials in Rat Neocortical Pyramidal Neurons},
journal = {Journal of Neurophysiology},
year = 1998,
volume = 79,
pages = {2432-2446}

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