scaling of brain metabolism with a fixed energy budget per neuron implications for neuronal activity, plasticity and evolution扩展大脑的新陈代谢与一个固定的能源预算每个神经元影响神经元活动,可塑性和演化.pdfVIP

Scaling of Brain Metabolism with a Fixed Energy Budget per Neuron: Implications for Neuronal Activity, Plasticity and Evolution Suzana Herculano-Houzel1,2* ˆ ´ ˆ 1 Instituto de Ciencias Biomedicas, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, 2 Instituto Nacional de Neurociencia Translacional, ´ ˆ ˜ ˜ Ministerio de Ciencia e Tecnologia, Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brasil Abstract It is usually considered that larger brains have larger neurons, which consume more energy individually, and are therefore accompanied by a larger number of glial cells per neuron. These notions, however, have never been tested. Based on glucose and oxygen metabolic rates in awake animals and their recently determined numbers of neurons, here I show that, contrary to the expected, the estimated glucose use per neuron is remarkably constant, varying only by 40% across the six species of rodents and primates (including humans). The estimated average glucose use per neuron does not correlate with neuronal density in any structure. This suggests that the energy budget of the whole brain per neuron is fixed across species and brain sizes, such that total glucose use by the brain as a whole, by the cerebral cortex and also by the cerebellum alone are linear functions of the number of neurons in the structures across the species (although the average glucose consumption per neuron is at least 10 6higher in the cerebral cortex than in the cerebellum). These results indicate that the apparently remarkable use in humans of 20% of the whole body energy budget by a brain that represents only 2% of body mass is explained simpl