Dendritic shaft constrictions shape synaptic integration in neurons.

Overview

Abstract

For nearly 150 years, textbooks have described dendritic morphology as optimized for efficient synaptic voltage transfer from spines to the soma, implemented as a tubular design respecting Rall’s 3/2 rule for impedance matching at branch points. Here, we reveal that this view is an oversimplification. Using multiple high-resolution imaging techniques, we demonstrate that dendrites in cortical and hippocampal neurons exhibit nanoscale constrictions, termed dendritic shaft constrictions (DSCs), with diameters ranging from ∼100 to 500 nanometers in mice. We also identified DSCs in human hippocampal and cortical neurons. We provide theoretical and experimental lines of evidence that these constrictions effectively partition the dendrite into distinct electrical compartments, shaping dendritic integration of synaptic potentials.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

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Data

Datasets cited

• zenodo:14037025 — at Zenodo; found in “Data, code, and materials availability:”

Data, code, and materials availability

All data and code needed to evaluate and reproduce the results in the paper are present in the paper and the Supplementary Materials. This study did not generate new materials. Data used to generate the figures are available at Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/records/14037025). Code used to analyze the data is also available in the Zenodo repository and GitHub (https://github.com/tonykelly00/DSC_morphology_pipeline), and code for the ball and stick model is available on GitHub (https://github.com/tonykelly00/DSC_model)

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

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Version 1, 27 September 2026: the first record

Recorded: type, language, journal, volume, issue, pages, dates, 23 authors, 7 MeSH terms, 1 funder, 49 references.

Cite

This paper

Kelly, T., Döngi, M., Rodriguez-Gatica, J. E., Ofer, N., Wert-Carvajal, C., Cissewski, N., Barboni, M., Bethge, P., Godale, C. M., Yaser, S., Herde, M. K., Tillmann, J., Peter, S. I., Dupraz, S., Koch, H., Stein, V., Bradke, F., Danzer, S. C., Tchumatchenko, T., . . . Beck, H. (2026). Dendritic shaft constrictions shape synaptic integration in neurons. Science advances, 12(37), eaec4911. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aec4911

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