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Synaptic physiology

Kiss-me-quick synapses

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 4, page 520 (2003)Cite this article

Our understanding of synaptic exocytosis — the process by which individual vesicles fuse with the cell membrane and release their loads of neurotransmitter into the synaptic cleft — has come on in leaps and bounds over recent years. But what happens next is more of a mystery. It is generally thought that most vesicles collapse into the presynaptic membrane before their components are retrieved, but another school of thought suggests that some vesicles do not collapse; instead, they fuse transiently with the membrane and open a fusion pore, before closing the pore and being recycled as a unit. This mechanism, which is called 'kiss-and-run' exocytosis, receives strong support from the two new papers.

In the first study, Gandhi and Stevens infected hippocampal neurons with a virus carrying the gene for synaptophluorin — a pH-sensitive marker that fluoresces when the inside of a vesicle is exposed to the external medium. When a cultured neuron is stimulated, the fluorescence rises as vesicles fuse with the membrane and then falls back as they are endocytosed. By studying the time course of these events, the authors were able to show that vesicles undergo three distinct types of exocytosis. In the first, which Gandhi and Stevens specifically call kiss-and-run, vesicles are recycled quickly (in less than a second) and the fusion pore that opens is selective — for example, the buffer Tris can enter the vesicles but another buffer, HEPES, cannot.

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References

ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPERS

  1. Gandhi, S. P. & Stevens, C. F. Three modes of synaptic vesicular recycling revealed by single-vesicle imaging. Nature 423, 607–613 (2003)

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  2. Aravanis, A. M. et al. Single synaptic vesicles fusing transiently and successively without loss of identity. Nature 423, 643–647 (2003)

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FURTHER READING

  1. Rizzoli, S. O. & Betz, W. J. All change at the synapse. Nature 423, 591–592 (2003)

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  2. Rizo, J. & Südhof, T. C. SNARES and Munc18 in synaptic vesicle fusion. Nature Rev. Neurosci. 3, 641–653 (2002)

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

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Authors
  1. Rachel Jones
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Jones, R. Kiss-me-quick synapses. Nat Rev Neurosci 4, 520 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn1157

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn1157

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