There is by now general agreement that individual nerve cells distribute their
excitable machinery in a far from uniform fashion. At the gross level the
cause for this heterogeneity is clear: the basal and apical dendritic trees,
cell body and axon are serving quite separate functions. At the fine level the
precise identification of the detailed distribution of synapses and ion
channels is a difficult, though extremely important, problem.
We here explain why it is important, survey past attacks, and present new
theoretical results.
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