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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2014 May 13.
Published in final edited form as: Bioessays. 2011 Jan;33(1):61–72. doi: 10.1002/bies.201000095

Figure 2. Circuits that refine their connectivity based on neurotransmission.

Figure 2

In many systems, postsynaptic cells receive erroneous connections that are eliminated by maturity. A: At the mammalian neuromuscular junction (NMJ), multiple motor neurons (MN) contact a muscle fiber (MF) at a single junction in early development but only one axon remains at maturity. B: In some vertebrate visual systems, connections from retinal ganglion cells (RGC) representing the left and right eyes are segregated into eye-specific layers in the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus (dLGN) and ocular dominance columns (ODCs) in the visual cortex (VC). Eye-specific layers form prior to eye-opening and before ODCs appear. C: In the rodent cerebellum, multiple cells from the inferior olivary nucleus make climbing fiber (CF) connections onto the cell body of each Purkinje cell (PC). All but one input is subsequently removed, and the remaining climbing fiber expands its territory to innervate the proximal dendrites of the Purkinje cell.