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Glial ankyrins function at the junction

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 15, page 769 (2014)Cite this article

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The mechanisms involved in the assembly and maintenance of paranodal axon–glial junctions that flank nodes of Ranvier are not completely understood. Rasband and colleagues showed that the scaffolding proteins ankyrin B (ANKB) and ankyrin G (ANKG) are enriched on the glial, rather than the neuronal side of paranodal junctions in the peripheral nervous system (PNS) and CNS, respectively. Experiments in mice lacking ANKB or ANKG in myelinating glia (Ankb-cKO mice and Ankg-cKO mice, respectively) showed that ANKB is not required for paranodal junction assembly, function or maintenance in the PNS, but that ANKG is important for rapid junction assembly during CNS myelination. In the CNS of Ankg-cKO mice, ANKB could partially compensate for the loss of paranodal ANKG. In a second paper, Rasband and colleagues show that another ankyrin, ANKR, is expressed in myelinated axons and that ANKR can substitute for ANKG in its role in Na+-channel clustering at nodes of Ranvier. These studies provide new insight into the functional roles of ankyrins at nodes and paranodes.

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References

  1. Chang, K.-J. et al. Glial ankyrins facilitate paranodal axoglial junction assembly. Nature Neurosci. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nn.3858 (2014)

  2. Ho, T. S.-Y. et al. A hierarchy of ankyrin-spectrin complexes cluster sodium channels at nodes of Ranvier. Nature Neurosci. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nn.3859 (2014)

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  1. Leonie Welberg
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Welberg, L. Glial ankyrins function at the junction. Nat Rev Neurosci 15, 769 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn3872

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