TALKEETNA, Al. (KTUU) - A cat named Stubbs has been the mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska for nearly all of his life. It's been that way for more than a decade in the small tourist town that boasts nearly 900 residents.
DAT is an integral membrane protein that removes dopamine from the synaptic cleft and deposits it into surrounding cells, thus terminating the signal of the neurotransmitter. Dopamine underlies several aspects of cognition, including reward, and DAT facilitates regulation of that signal.
Someone explained it to me that way: there are two ways to disable a synapse: either remove it or make it non responsive (set its weight to 0). The first solution is structural plasticity, the second one is functional plasticity (the synapse is still there, but just functionally disabled). Of course plasticity isn't just about disabling a synapse, but this is what the topic of discussion was at the moment with the guy I talked with, and I thought it was a quite simple enough explanation to remember it easily.