NEW YORK — The kind of cell displayed here in 3D has long been known to help the brain remember specific places. It’s a pyramidal neuron, essential for creating and updating our mental maps of the world, such as when we move to a new home or office. 

Now scientists at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute have revealed that this extraordinary ability comes from the cell’s branches (specifically the tips of the branches), as described in a new study in Neuron.

“We wanted to better understand how one neuron gets the privilege to be part of a memory,” said first and co-corresponding author of the new study Justin O'Hare, PhD, formerly a joint postdoc in the labs of Drs. Losonczy and Polleux, now an assistant professor of pharmacology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

Dr. O’Hare and his colleagues let mice explore a virtual reality world of novel mazes of hallways. As the rodents navigated these new environments, over and over again, they discovered locations that delivered sips of water. 

The researchers monitored the pyramidal neurons, in exquisite detail, during the moments those place memories formed. This revealed that the more activity was happening during learning in the tips of a cell’s branches, called dendrites, the more that neuron attuned itself to one specific location.

"The level of computation we saw in the dendrites of each single cell was comparable to a supercomputer," said study co-senior author Franck Polleux, PhD, a principal investigator at Columbia's Zuckerman Institute. "And that's just a single cell. There are tens of thousands of cells like this in one layer of the mouse hippocampus."

Dr. Polleux suspects that dendritic activity may also play a role in the longevity of memories, perhaps connecting these branches to memory disorders such as Alzheimer’s, a hypothesis the same authors are testing right now.