Endoplasmic reticulum visits highly active spines and prevents runaway potentiation of synapses

Alberto Perez-Alvarez (), Shuting Yin, Christian Schulze, John A. Hammer, Wolfgang Wagner and Thomas G. Oertner ()
Additional contact information
Alberto Perez-Alvarez: University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf
Shuting Yin: University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf
Christian Schulze: University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf
John A. Hammer: National Health, Lung and Blood Institute (NIH)
Wolfgang Wagner: University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf
Thomas G. Oertner: University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf

Nature Communications, 2020, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract In hippocampal pyramidal cells, a small subset of dendritic spines contain endoplasmic reticulum (ER). In large spines, ER frequently forms a spine apparatus, while smaller spines contain just a single tubule of smooth ER. Here we show that the ER visits dendritic spines in a non-random manner, targeting spines during periods of high synaptic activity. When we blocked ER motility using a dominant negative approach against myosin V, spine synapses became stronger compared to controls. We were not able to further potentiate these maxed-out synapses, but long-term depression (LTD) was readily induced by low-frequency stimulation. We conclude that the brief ER visits to active spines have the important function of preventing runaway potentiation of individual spine synapses, keeping most of them at an intermediate strength level from which both long-term potentiation (LTP) and LTD are possible.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18889-5 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:11:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-020-18889-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-18889-5

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().