TY - JOUR A1 - Knodel, Markus Michael A1 - Queisser, Sean Gillian A1 - Bucher, Dan A1 - Geiger, Romina A1 - Ge, Lee How A1 - Grillo, Alfio A1 - Schuster, Christoph M. A1 - Wittum, Gabriel T1 - Synaptic bouton sizes are tuned to best fit their physiological performances : poster presentation from Twentieth Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting: CNS*2011, Stockholm, Sweden, 23 - 28 July 2011 T2 - BMC neuroscience 2011, 12(Suppl 1):P371 N2 - Poster presentation from Twentieth Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting: CNS*2011 Stockholm, Sweden. 23-28 July 2011. To truly appreciate the myriad of events which relate synaptic function and vesicle dynamics, simulations should be done in a spatially realistic environment. This holds true in particular in order to explain the rather astonishing motor patterns presented here which we observed within in vivo recordings which underlie peristaltic contractions at a well characterized synapse, the neuromuscular junction (NMJ) of the Drosophila larva. To this end, we have employed a reductionist approach and generated three dimensional models of single presynaptic boutons at the Drosophila larval NMJ. Vesicle dynamics are described by diffusion-like partial differential equations which are solved numerically on unstructured grids using the uG platform. In our model we varied parameters such as bouton-size, vesicle output probability (Po), stimulation frequency and number of synapses, to observe how altering these parameters effected bouton function. Hence we demonstrate that the morphologic and physiologic specialization maybe a convergent evolutionary adaptation to regulate the trade off between sustained, low output, and short term, high output, synaptic signals. There seems to be a biologically meaningful explanation for the co-existence of the two different bouton types as previously observed at the NMJ (characterized especially by the relation between size and Po),the assigning of two different tasks with respect to short- and long-time behaviour could allow for an optimized interplay of different synapse types. As a side product, we demonstrate how advanced methods from numerical mathematics could help in future to resolve also other difficult experimental neurobiological issues. Y1 - 2011 UR - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/22062 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30-110010 N1 - © 2011 Knodel et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. VL - 12(Suppl 1) IS - P371 ER -