Figure 4

Rules for optimizing dendritic branching. (A) Minimum spanning tree for randomly distributed points in the convex hull of dendritic territory of HSS neurons. Longest path is drawn in bold. (B) Extended minimum spanning tree, minimizing both the total path length from all synaptic locations to the root and the total wiring length. (C) Branching and termination points as putative sites for synaptic contacts for the HSS dendritic tree shown in Figure 1D, same algorithm as in B, using the putative synaptic sites from C. Dendritic root is marked with a circle. (E, F) Dendrograms representing the topology of the reconstructed HSS neuron and the artificially constructed dendritic tree shown in D, respectively.