Peering through an emap microscope is enough to determine which cellular protrusions are filopodia.

通过eMAP显微镜观察足以确定哪些细胞突起是树突丝。

The next thing to investigate is how, why and when new filopodia appear.

下一步要调查的是新的树突丝是如何、为什么以及何时出现的。

To do that, they needed to test how the filopodia responded to glutamate, the brain's main excitatory neurotransmitter.

要做到这一点，他们需要测试树突丝对谷氨酸的反应，谷氨酸也就是大脑主要的兴奋性神经递质。

Just over a quarter of the connections they sampled in adult mouse visual cortices were silent synapses on filopodia.

他们在成年小鼠的视皮层中采样的突触中，略多于四分之一是树突丝上的沉默突触。

They were able to induce the silent versions on filopodia to turn into mature, active synapses by pairing the simulated release of glutamate with a subsequent surge of electricity inside the neuron.

他们能够模拟谷氨酸释放，结合神经元内的电流，将树突丝上的沉默突触变为成熟、活跃的突触。

Silent synapses - which, as their name suggests, transmit no signal from one nerve cell to another - are often found on the ends of slender, immature protrusions from nerve cells, called filopodia.

沉默突触——顾名思义，它不会将信号从一个神经细胞传递到另一个神经细胞——通常出现在神经细胞细长的未成熟突起的末端，称为树突丝。

To carry out their search for filopodia, the trio used a sensitive microscopy technique called eMAP.They studied 2,234 synapses between cortical nerve cells of a type called pyramidal neurons (pictured), which have thousands of synapses each.

为了寻找丝状伪足，三人使用了一种称为 eMAP 的灵敏显微镜技术。 他们研究了一种称为锥体神经元（如图）的皮质神经细胞之间的 2, 234 个突触， 每个神经元都有数千个突触。