Pratt Kara G, Taft Christine E, Burbea Michelle, Turrigiano Gina G
Department of Biology and Center for Behavioral Genomics, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02454, USA.
Dev Neurobiol. 2008 Feb 1;68(2):143-51. doi: 10.1002/dneu.20577.
Changes in connectivity between pairs of neurons can serve as a substrate for information storage and for experience-dependent changes in neuronal circuitry. Early in development, synaptic contacts form and break, but how these dynamics influence the connectivity between pairs of neurons is not known. Here we used time-lapse imaging to examine the synaptic interactions between pairs of cultured cortical pyramidal neurons, and found that the axon-dendrite contacts between each neuronal pair were composed of both a relatively stable and a more labile population. Under basal conditions, loss and gain of contacts within this labile population was well balanced and there was little net change in connectivity. Selectively increasing the levels of activated CaMKII in the postsynaptic neuron increased connectivity between pairs of neurons by increasing the rate of gain of new contacts without affecting the probability of contact loss, or the proportion of stable and labile contacts, and this increase required Calcium/calmodulin binding to CaMKII. Our data suggest that activating CaMKII can increase synaptic connectivity through a CaM-dependent increase in contact formation, followed by stabilization of a constant fraction of new contacts.
神经元对之间连接性的变化可作为信息存储以及神经元回路中依赖经验的变化的基础。在发育早期,突触联系形成并断裂,但这些动态过程如何影响神经元对之间的连接性尚不清楚。在这里,我们使用延时成像来检查培养的皮质锥体神经元对之间的突触相互作用,发现每个神经元对之间的轴突 - 树突接触由相对稳定和更不稳定的群体组成。在基础条件下,这个不稳定群体中接触的丢失和增加得到很好的平衡,连接性几乎没有净变化。选择性地增加突触后神经元中活化的CaMKII水平,通过增加新接触的获得率而不影响接触丢失的概率或稳定和不稳定接触的比例,从而增加了神经元对之间的连接性,并且这种增加需要钙/钙调蛋白与CaMKII结合。我们的数据表明,激活CaMKII可以通过CaM依赖性增加接触形成,随后稳定一定比例的新接触来增加突触连接性。