Impact of functional synapse clusters on neuronal response selectivity.

Clustering of functionally similar synapses in dendrites is thought to affect input-output transformation by inducing dendritic nonlinearities. However, neither the in vivo impact of synaptic clusters on somatic membrane potential (sVm), nor the rules of cluster formation are elucidated. We developed a computational approach to measure the effect of functional synaptic clusters on sVm response of biophysical model CA1 and L2/3 pyramidal neurons to behaviorally relevant in vivo-like inputs. Large-scale dendritic spatial inhomogeneities in synaptic tuning properties did influence sVm, but small synaptic clusters appearing randomly with unstructured connectivity did not. With structured connectivity, ~10-20 synapses per cluster was optimal for clustering-based tuning, but larger responses were achieved by 2-fold potentiation of the same synapses. We further show that without nonlinear amplification of the effect of random clusters, action potential-based, global plasticity rules can not generate functional clustering. Our results suggest that clusters likely form via local synaptic interactions, and have to be moderately large to impact sVm responses.