Microscopic Evidence of the Spacing of Synapses on Axons

Abstract

The question of “specificity” being of prime importance for our general view of the cortical network, we decided to tackle the problem directly by counts of synapses formed by selected axons. Our first approach was with the electron microscope (Schüz and Münster, 1985), a task requiring rather tedious work on serial sections. We then discovered a short cut, permitting us to count synapses on much larger samples, and much more easily, by means of the light microscope (Hellwig 1992; Hellwig et al., 1994).