Electrical Synapse - History

History

The model of a reticular network of directly interconnected cells was one of the early hypotheses for the organization of the nervous system at the beginning of the 20th century. This reticular hypothesis was considered to conflict directly with the now predominant neuron doctrine, a model in which isolated, individual neurons signal to each other chemically across synaptic gaps. These two models came into sharp contrast at the award ceremony for the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, in which the award went jointly to Camillo Golgi, a reticularist and widely recognized cell biologist, and Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the champion of the neuron doctrine and the father of modern neuroscience. Golgi delivered his Nobel lecture first, in part detailing evidence for a reticular model of the nervous system. Ramón y Cajal then took the podium and refuted Golgi's conclusions in his lecture. Modern understanding of the coexistence of chemical and electrical synapses, however, suggests that both models are physiologically significant; it could be said that the Nobel committee acted with great foresight in awarding the Prize jointly.

There was substantial debate on whether the transmission of information between neurons was chemical or electrical in the first decades of the twentieth century, but chemical synaptic transmission was seen as the only answer after Otto Loewi's demonstration of chemical communication between neurons and heart muscle. Thus, the discovery of electrical communication was surprising.

Electrical synapses were first demonstrated between escape-related giant neurons in crayfish in the late 1950s, and were later found in vertebrates.