One mossy fiber and the CA3 pyramidal cell it contacts. Drag to
orbit, scroll to zoom, scrub to move the signal.
0µm of cable
at rest
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The rendered animations on the main page show the same event.
The pulse is not a sweep across the screen. Every vertex of
these meshes carries its own distance measured along the cell's own skeleton, so
the wavefront follows the real branching and splits wherever the cable splits.
The signal travels the fiber to the boutons, then from the thorn through the cell
to the soma, 130.5 µm of cable away, and out along the
descending arbor. The 31% of dendrite it never enters stays dark, because
that is where it does not go.
Simplified for the browser: 110,000 faces against 4.5 million in the
rendered version, so the thorny excrescences are smoothed away here.