Mechanisms underlying long-term potentiation of synaptic transmission.

A curious property of excitatory synapses in the hippocampus and some other neural tissues is that when they are heavily used, they undergo a long­ lasting increase in their efficacy. Brief repetitive activation of hippocampal excitatory synapses results in a substantial increase in synaptic strength that can last for several hours and has been detected even weeks after induction. This use-dependent strengthening of a synapse is known as long-term potentiation, or more commonly, LTP (Bliss & Lorna 1973, Lomo 1966, Bliss & Lynch 1988). LTP occurs most prominently in the hippocampus, where consolidation of experience into long-term memory is thought to occur. LTP is the most compelling and widely studied model