Open AccessThe narrowing of dendrite branches across nodes follows a well-defined scaling law
Author(s) -
Maijia Liao,
Xin Liang,
Jonathon Howard
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 5.011
H-Index - 771
eISSN - 1091-6490
pISSN - 0027-8424
DOI - 10.1073/pnas.2022395118
Subject(s) - dendrite (mathematics) , scaling law , scaling , branching (polymer chemistry) , terminal (telecommunication) , segmentation , biophysics , physics , computer science , biology , chemistry , mathematics , geometry , artificial intelligence , telecommunications , organic chemistry
Significance To study the systematic variation of dendrite diameters, we established a superresolution method that allows us to resolve dendrite diameters inDrosophila class IV dendritic arborization neurons, a model cell for studying branching morphogenesis. Interestingly, the diameters do not follow any of the known scaling laws. We propose a different scaling law that follows from two concepts: Terminal branches have the smallest diameters, whose average is about 230 nm, and there is an incremental increase in cross-sectional area needed to support each additional terminal branch. The law is consistent with the growing dendritic tips making the primary metabolic demand, which is supplied by microtubule-based transport. If the law generalizes to other neurons, it may facilitate segmentation in connectomic studies.