Lichtman's talk

Jeff Lichtman gave a talk about competition between axons connecting to a single neuromuscular junction on 1/10 here at Cold Spring Harbor Lab. His group has been imaging axons expressing YFP or CFP, and directly measure the battle between two axons: both axons try to take more synapse area. Interestingly the fate of the competition is determined globally: if a yellow axon loose the battle at one synapse to a blue axon, most likely all of other synapses of the yellow axon also loose to the blue axon. Furthremore, the one loosing battles always innovating more synapses. Thus, it seems like a single axon has only a limited amount of resource, and if one keep winning to have more synapses, the one run out of resources, and start to loose other battles. Interesting questions would be 1) what kind of resource limits the number of synapses and 2) how experience of synapses affect battles. It would be important to measure activity of synapses of winning and loosing axons to solve these questions.