Dale's principle

In neuroscience, Dale's principle (or Dale's law) is a rule attributed to the English neuroscientist Henry Hallett Dale. The principle basically states that a neuron performs the same chemical action at all of its synaptic connections to other cells, regardless of the identity of the target cell. However, there has been disagreement about the precise wording. Because of an ambiguity in the original statement, there are actually two versions of the principle, one that has been shown definitively to be false, and another that remains a valuable rule of thumb. The term "Dale's principle" was first used by Sir John Eccles in 1954, in a passage reading, "In conformity with Dale's principle (1934, 1952) that the same chemical transmitter is released from all the synaptic terminals of a neurone..." Some modern writers have understood the principle to state that neurons release one and only one transmitter at all of their synapses, which is false. Others, including Eccles himself in later publications, have taken it to mean that neurons release the same set of transmitters at all of their synapses. Dale himself never stated his "principle" in an explicit form. The source that Eccles referred to was a lecture published by Dale in 1934, called Pharmacology and nerve endings, describing some of the early research into the physiology of neurotransmission. At that time, only two chemical transmitters were known, acetylcholine and noradrenaline (then thought to be adrenaline). In the peripheral nervous system, cholinergic and adrenergic transmission were known to arise from different groups of nerve fibers. Dale was interested in the possibility that a neuron releasing one of these chemicals in the periphery might also release the same chemical at central synapses. He wrote: It is to be noted, further, that in the cases for which direct evidence is already available, the phenomena of regeneration appear to indicate that the nature of the chemical function, whether cholinergic or adrenergic, is characteristic for each particular neurone, and unchangeable.