Marwan Abdellah

eLife Assessment This useful study presents a biologically realistic, large-scale cortical model of the rat's non-barrel somatosensory cortex, investigating synaptic plasticity of excitatory connections under varying patterns of external activations and characterizing relations between network architecture and plasticity outcomes.

Learning and memory are orchestrated by synaptic plasticity, the ability of synapses to change their efficacy in an activity-dependent manner. Donald O. Hebb’s postulate about how synaptic plasticity might manifest was paraphrased with the well known mantra: “cells that fire together, wire together” (Hebb, 1949; Shatz, 1992).

Abstract Synaptic plasticity underlies the brain's ability to learn and adapt. While experiments in brain slices have revealed mechanisms and protocols for the induction of plasticity between pairs of neurons, how these synaptic changes are coordinated in biological neuronal networks to ensure the emergence of learning remains poorly understood.