Abstract
The dentate gyrus in the mammalian brain is an extremely complex structure containing millions of cells (over 1 million in the rat and many more in primates) of numerous types connected together by billions of synapses. Despite this complexity, the dentate is a highly ordered structure and decades of research have led to a deep understanding of the anatomical and physiological properties of the cells contained therein. Since the dentate is thought to serve as a gate for activity propagation throughout the limbic system (Heinemann et al. 1992; Lothman et al. 1992), understanding of its structure and components is important for developing therapeutic interventions for treating neurological disorders such as epilepsy. Epilepsy and the process by which a normal brain becomes epileptic (epileptogenesis) are complex themselves, however, and result in myriad changes to the dentate gyrus on both molecular and cellular levels.
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Morgan, R.J., Soltesz, I. (2010). Microcircuit Model of the Dentate Gyrus in Epilepsy. In: Cutsuridis, V., Graham, B., Cobb, S., Vida, I. (eds) Hippocampal Microcircuits. Springer Series in Computational Neuroscience, vol 5. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0996-1_17
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