Calcium imaging has been used widely to measure activity at individual synapses, mostly in spines (Chen et al., 2011, Denk et al., 1996, Murphy et al., 1994 and Zito et al., 2009), but also in spineless dendrites (Goldberg et al., 2003, Katona et al., 2011, Murphy et al., 1995 and Murthy et al., 2000). We found that synaptic
calcium transients can be identified and separated reliably from nonsynaptic calcium transients across the entire dendritic arborization by simultaneous patch-clamp recordings in voltage-clamp mode. We also showed that our approach reveals a purely glutamatergic Akt inhibitor population of synapses, which allowed mapping excitatory synapses without pharmacological identification, making imaging the synaptome fast and—in fact—possible.
We had also considered mapping the inhibitory synaptome by increasing the chloride reversal potential, such that GABAergic transmission would mediate inward currents, trigger local depolarization, and open voltage gated calcium channels. However, for a number of reasons, an important one being the need to separate GABAergic and glutamatergic transmission with time consuming pharmacological FDA approval PARP inhibitor means making large volume maps unfeasible, we decided to restricted our analysis here to the excitatory synaptome, i.e., glutamatergic synapses. Besides being instrumental for identifying specific spatiotemporal input patterns impinging onto the dendrites of developing neurons, we expect that our approach will also be useful for comparing synaptic function between neurons during different developmental states and of different subclasses, genetic backgrounds, or from models of neurological disorders. While the structure of individual neurons has been routinely quantified for such purposes, the “synaptic state” of neurons has not been mapped with the spatiotemporal resolution described here. For example,
we see great potential in deciphering the role of specific proteins in synaptic development and developmental plasticity. Electron transport chain Furthermore, in neurodevelopmental diseases some connections are functionally aberrant whereas others are normal (Gibson et al., 2008). To identify the specific functional aberrations imaging the synaptome may become highly beneficial. The most striking observation from our analysis of the developing “synaptome” is the strong relationship between the function of individual synapses and their location. Specifically, synapses that are located within a distance of 16 μm from each other are much more likely to be coactive than synapses that are further apart. We considered possible causes underlying coactivation of neighboring synapses. First, we tested whether individual axons might form multiple synapses at nearby positions along the dendrite.