Notwithstanding its success in explaining the maturation and refinement of downstream circuits and sensory maps, our understanding of the underpinnings of this developmental model is still far from complete.
Our observation is in line with numerous studies showing that the maturation and refinement of corticospinal pathways crucially depends on motor behaviour and the neural activity it elicits in early life (Eyre, 2007; Martin et al., 2007).
This is because system-based methods are still in a stage of maturation and refinement.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.04047.019 Synaptic maturation and refinement, wherein appropriate synapses are strengthened while superfluous connections are eliminated, are critical for the establishment of functional neuronal circuitry.
Around the time of eye opening, there is a period of intense synapse formation that gradually gives way to processes involved in synapse maturation and refinement, including synapse elimination.
Mice lacking SynI, SynII, SynI/II or SynI/II/III are all prone to epileptic seizures starting at an age of 2 3 months [22,24,45], a period of intense synapse maturation and refinement in which Syns I/II have already reached high expression levels [46,47].
In the case of layer VI pyramidal neurons, the timing of the sex differences in nicotinic currents suggests that they may contribute to sex differences in the refinement and maturation of cortical projections to the inhibitory thalamic reticular neurons and excitatory thalamic projection neurons [8], [47], [48], [49].
Protein models were refined by rigid body refinement and restrained refinement using Buster.
First and foremost, essentially every stage of normal neural development, from neurogenesis and differentiation to axon pathfinding, synapse maturation and circuit refinement, has been studied in detail in Xenopus tadpoles (Cline and Kelly, 2012; Sanes et al., 2012).
The model was refined with Refmac5 [75] using restrained maximum-likelihood refinement and TLS refinement [79].
