1. Department of Biology, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093-0357, USA
2. These authors contributed equally to this work.
3. Present address: Department of Anatomy, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3DY, UK.

Correspondence to: Mu-ming Poo¹ Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to M.-m.P. (e-mail: Email: mpoo@ucsd.edu).

Abstract

In the developing frog visual system, topographic refinement of the retinotectal projection depends on electrical activity. In vivo whole-cell recording from developing Xenopus tectal neurons shows that convergent retinotectal synapses undergo activity-dependent cooperation and competition following correlated pre- and postsynaptic spiking within a narrow time window. Synaptic inputs activated repetitively within 20 ms before spiking of the tectal neuron become potentiated, whereas subthreshold inputs activated within 20 ms after spiking become depressed. Thus both the initial synaptic strength and the temporal order of activation are critical for heterosynaptic interactions among convergent synaptic inputs during activity-dependent refinement of developing neural networks.