albertcardona, 21 days ago

A remarkable finding from Shapson-Coe et al. 2024 paper on human brain #connectomics: the presence of canalized connections in the human brain cortex. Canalized in the Kauffman boolean networks sense [1], which here means: among the many synaptic inputs that any one neuron integrates, some are far stronger (by number of synapses) than the rest.

This is a pattern that we described in the #Drosophila larval nervous system (Ohyama et al. 2015 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14297 ) and that has been reported as well for the mouse hippocampus (Bartol et al. 2015 https://elifesciences.org/articles/10778 ) and cerebellum (Nguyen et al. 2023 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05471-w ).

[1] Canalisation as a term was introduced by Waddington in 1942 in the context of genetics to mean "some phenotypic traits are very robust to small perturbations" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canalisation_(genetics)

#neuroscience #connectomics