PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Rui Ponte Costa AU - Beatriz E.P. Mizusaki AU - P. Jesper Sjöström AU - Mark C. W. van Rossum TI - Functional consequences of pre- and postsynaptic expression of synaptic plasticity AID - 10.1101/075317 DP - 2016 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 075317 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/10/29/075317.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/10/29/075317.full AB - Growing experimental evidence shows that both homeostatic and Hebbian synaptic plasticity can be expressed presynaptically as well as postsynaptically. In this review, we start by discussing this evidence and methods used to determine expression loci. Next, we discuss functional consequences of this diversity in pre- and postsynaptic expression of both homeostatic and Hebbian synaptic plasticity. In particular, we explore the functional consequences of a biologically tuned model of pre- and postsynaptically expressed spike-timing-dependent plasticity complemented with postsynaptic homeostatic control. The pre- and postsynaptic expression in this model predicts 1) more reliable receptive fields and sensory perception, 2) rapid recovery of forgotten information (memory savings) and 3) reduced response latencies, compared to a model with postsynaptic expression only. Finally we discuss open questions that will require a considerable research effort to better elucidate how the specific locus of expression of homeostatic and Hebbian plasticity alters synaptic and network computations.