Abstract:

Throughout the entirety of the auditory pathway, excitatory glutamatergic projections primarily link neural stations with one another, act to shape and refine these afferent signals. Dr. Charles C. Lee, who comes from Louisiana State University in USA, thier recent studies suggest an alternative perspective; specifically, that some glutamatergic pathways in the central auditory system instead modulate the information received through the information-bearing glutamatergic pathways. Furthermore, these distinctions among glutamatergic pathways are not limited to the auditory system and are also found in the visual and somatosensory pathways. Furthermore, the putative modulatory glutamatergic pathways, with their distal dendritic synaptic locations and activation of metabotropic glutamate receptors might be more ideally constructed to support sustained and longer-term alterations to synaptic strength and efficacy. Thus, the relative plasticity of these two types of glutamatergic pathways may inherently limit the regenerative capacity of various components in the auditory processing stream. Consequently, regenerating or repairing damage to the central auditory pathways may benefit from targeting selected glutamatergic synaptic types.