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Science 8 March 2002:
Vol. 295. no. 5561, pp. 1845 - 1846
DOI: 10.1126/science.1070513
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Perspectives

NEUROBIOLOGY:
What the Synapse Tells the Neuron

Bartlett W. Mel

How do neurons integrate the thousands of synaptic inputs to their dendrites that arrive from other nerve cells? In his Perspective, Mel discusses new findings in the pyramidal neurons of rat brain that show how synaptic responses vary depending on their site of origin in the dendritic tree and how tiny signals from far out in the dendrites can be boosted so that the cell body receives a large signal (Williams and Stuart).

The author is in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Neuroscience Graduate Program, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA. E-mail: mel{at}usc.edu

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)