Medial temporal lobe structures are responsible for recording the continuous stream of autobiographical memories that define our unique personal history. Remarkably, these areas can construct durable memories from brief exposures to the constantly changing activity patterns arriving from antecedent cortical areas. Using a computer model of the hippocampal Schaffer collateral pathway that incorporates evidence for dendritic spikes in CA1 pyramidal neurons, we searched for biologically-plausible long-term potentiation (LTP) and homeostatic depression (HD) rules that maximize “online” learning capacity. We found memory utilization is most efficient when (1) very few synapses are modified to store each pattern, (2) LTP — the learning operation --is dendrite-specific and gated by distinct pre- and postsynaptic thresholds, (3) HD — the forgetting operation — co-occurs with LTP and targets least-recently potentiated synapses, and (4) both LTP and HD are all-or-none, leading de facto to binary-valued synaptic weights. In networks containing 40 million synapses, the novel learning scheme led to order-of-magnitude capacity increases compared to conventional plasticity rules.

Photobleaching is a major limitation of superresolution Stimulated Depletion Emission (STED) microscopy. Fast scanning has long been considered an effective means to reduce photobleaching in fluorescence microscopy, but a careful quantitative study of this issue is missing. In this paper, we show that the photobleaching rate in STED microscopy can be slowed down and the fluorescence yield be enhanced by scanning with high speed, enabled by using large field of view in a custom-built resonant-scanning STED microscope. The effect of scanning speed on photobleaching and fluorescence yield is more remarkable at higher levels of depletion laser irradiance, and virtually disappears in conventional confocal microscopy. With ≥6 GW∙cm−2 depletion irradiance, we were able to extend the fluorophore survival time of Atto 647N and Abberior STAR 635P by ~80% with 8-fold wider field of view. We confirm that STED Photobleaching is primarily caused by the depletion light acting upon the excited fluorophores. Experimental data agree with a theoretical model. Our results encourage further increasing the linear scanning speed for photobleaching reduction in STED microscopy.

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Summary To take full advantage of fast resonant scanning in super-resolution STimulated Emission Depletion (STED) microscopy, we have developed an ultrafast photon counting system based on a multi-giga-sample per second analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) chip that delivers an unprecedented 450 MHz pixel clock (2.2 ns pixel dwell time in each scan). The system achieves a large field of view (~50 × 50 μm) with fast scanning that reduces photobleaching, and advances the time-gated continuous wave (CW) STED technology to the usage of resonant scanning with hardware based time-gating. The assembled system provides superb signal-to-noise ratio and highly linear quantification of light that result in superior image quality. Also, the system design allows great flexibility in processing photon signals to further improve the dynamic range. In conclusion, we have constructed a frontier photon counting image acquisition system with ultrafast readout rate, excellent counting linearity, and with the capacity of realizing resonant-scanning CW-STED microscopy with on-line time-gated detection.