Maijia’s paper’s is published in PNAS!

To study the systematic variation of dendrite diameters, we established a superresolution method that allows us to resolve dendrite diameters in Drosophila class IV dendritic arborization neurons, a model cell for studying branching morphogenesis. Interestingly, the diameters do not follow any of the known scaling laws. We propose a different scaling law that follows from two concepts: Terminal branches have the smallest diameters, whose average is about 230 nm, and there is an incremental increase in cross-sectional area needed to support each additional terminal branch. The law is consistent with the growing dendritic tips making the primary metabolic demand, which is supplied by microtubule-based transport. If the law generalizes to other neurons, it may facilitate segmentation in connectomic studies.

read the whole paper here!