bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/118646; this version posted March 20, 2017. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY 4.0 International license. A new organotypic model of synaptic competition reveals activity-dependent localization of C1q Ryuta Koyama*1,2, Yuwen Wu*1, Allison R. Bialas1, Andrew Thompson1, Christina A. Welsh1, Arnaud Frouin1, Chinfei Chen1, Beth Stevens1 1Department of Neurology, F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center, Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA 2Present address: Laboratory of Chemical Pharmacology, Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan * contributed equally to this work Running title: Imaging and Manipulation of Synaptic Competition All correspondence should be addressed to B.S. Email:
[email protected] 1 bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/118646; this version posted March 20, 2017. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY 4.0 International license. Abstract Immature neural circuits undergo synaptic refinement, in which activity-dependent competition between synapses results in pruning of inappropriate connections and maintenance of appropriate ones. A longstanding question is how neuronal activity eliminates specific synapses based on their strength. The technical challenges of in vivo studies have made it difficult to identify a molecular link between decreased activity and synapse elimination.