Oil and Water at the Neuronal Synapse

(Originally published by Yale University)

July 5, 2018

Synaptic vesicles (blue) that harbor chemical messengers form tight clusters within nerve terminals.
Synaptic vesicles (blue) that harbor chemical messengers form tight clusters within nerve terminals. (Image courtesy of Dr. Yumel Wu, Yale School of Medicine)

The nervous system function relies on the tightly regulated spatial and temporal communication that occurs between neurons at specialized connections called synapses. Chemical signals called neurotransmitters, the molecules responsible for communication between neurons, are packed into hundreds of membrane sacks known as synaptic vesicles. These vesicles form tight clusters at the nerve terminal. Despite being held together, vesicles are highly mobile within these clusters, so that they can be randomly recruited to the surface of the cell to release their content upon activation of the neuron.

In a new paper which appeared online July 5 in the journal Science, Yale researchers describe how this compact but highly mobile structure is achieved. They found that synaptic vesicles organize themselves into a liquid compartment within the interior of the nerve terminal, much as oil does when mixed with water. The new research shows that groups of artificial vesicles resembling synaptic vesicles can “demix” in the presence of the abundant nerve terminal protein synapsin, explaining how vesicles can both remain tightly clustered yet rapidly fuse with membrane of neurons when activated, said Yale’s Dragomir Milovanovic, lead author of the study and postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Pietro De Camilli, director of the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience.

Neuroscience