The staggering implications of one axon synapsing on another

It isn’t often that a single paper can change the way we think the brain works.  But such is the case for the paper described in the previous post (full copy below *** ) if the implications I draw from it are correct.

Unfortunately this post requires a deep dive into neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, neuropharmacology and cellular molecular biology.  I hope to put in enough background to make some of it comprehensible, but it is really written for the cognoscenti in these fields.

I’m pretty sure that some of these thoughts are both original and unique

Briefly, the paper provided excellent evidence for one axon causing another to fire an impulse (an action potential).   The fireror was from a neuron using acetyl choline as a neurotransmitter, and the fireree was a dopamine axon going to the striatum.

Dopamine axons are special.  They go all over the brain. The cell body of the parent neuron of the axon to be synapsed on uses dopamine as a neurotransmitter.  It sits in the pars compacta of the substantia nigra a fair piece away from the target they studied (the striatum). “Individual neurons of the pars compacta are calculated to give rise to 4.5 meters of axons once all the branches are summed”  — [ Neuron vol. 96 p. 651 ’17 ].”  These axons release dopamine all over the brain.  There aren’t many dopamine neurons to begin with just 80,000 which is 1 millionth of the current (probably unreliable) estimate of the number of neurons in the brain 80,000,000,000.

Now synapses between neurons are easy to spot using electron microscopy.  The presynaptic terminal contains a bunch of small vesicles and is closely apposed (300 Angstroms — way below anything the our eyes can see) to the post synaptic neuron which also looks different, usually having a density just under the membrane (called, logically enough, post-synaptic density).  Embedded in the postsynaptic membrane are proteins which conduct ions such as Na+, K+, Cl- into the postsynaptic neuron triggering an action potential.

But the dopamine axons going all over the brain have a lot of presynaptic specialization, but in many of the cases the post-synaptic neuron and its postsynaptic density is nowhere to be found (or the receptors for dopamine aren’t near the presynaptic specialization).  This is called volume neurotransmission.

However, in the nuclei studied (the striatum) dopamine synapses on dendrites of the major cell type (the medium spiny neuron) are well described and the 5 receptors for dopamine (called G Protein Coupled Receptors — GPCRs) are found there.  None of the GPCRs conduct ions or trigger action potentials (immediately anyway).  Instead, they produce their effects much more slowly and change the metabolism of the interior of the cell.  This is true for all GPCRs, regardless of the ligand activating them — and humans have 826 GPCR genes.

Note also that volume neurotransmission means that dopamine reaches nonNeuronal tissue — and there is good evidence that dopamine receptors are present on glial cells, pericytes and blood vessels.

The story doesn’t end with dopamine.  There are 3 other similar systems of small numbers of neurons collected into nuclei, using different neurotransmitters, but whose axons branch and branch so they go all over the brain.

These are the locus coeruleus which uses norepinephrine as a neurotransmitter, the dorsal raphe nucleus which uses serotonin and the basal nucleus of Meynert which uses acetyl choline.  There is excellent evidence that the first two (norepinephrine and serotonin) use volume neurotransmission. I’m not sure about those of the basal nucleus of Meynert.

What is so remarkable about the paper, that it allows the receiving neurons to (partially) control what dopamine input it gets.

All norepinephrine receptors are GPCRs, while only one of the 16 or so serotonin receptors conducts ions, the rest being GPCRs.

Acetyl choline does have one class of receptors (nicotinic) which conducts ions, and which the paper shows is what is triggering the axon on axon synapse.  The other class (muscarinic) of acetyl choline receptor is a GPCR.

Addendum 29 September — it goes without saying (although I didn’t say it) that any molecule released by volume neurotransmission doesn’t confine itself to finding targets on neurons.  Especially with norepinephrine, it could bind to receptors for it on the vasculature causing circulatory effects.  They could also bind to GPCRs on pericytes and glia.

Now the paper tested axon to axon firing in one of the four systems (dopamine) in one of the places its axons goes (the striatum).  There is no question that the axons of all 4 systems ramify widely.

Suppose axon to axon firing is general, so a given region can control in someway how much dopamine/serotonin/norepinephrine/acetyl choline it is getting.

Does this remind you of any system you are familiar with?  Perhaps because my wife went to architecture school, it reminds me of an old apartment building, with separate systems to distribute electricity, plumbing, steam heat and water to each apartment, which controls how much of each it gets.

Perhaps these four systems are basically neurological utilities, necessary for  the function of the brain, but possibly irrelevant to the computations it is carrying out, like a mother heating a bottle for her baby in water on a gas stove on a cold winter night.  The nature of steam heat, electricity, water and gas tell you very little about what is going on in her apartment.

The paper is so new (the Neuron issue of 21 September) that more implications are sure to present themselves.

Quibbles are sure to arise.  One is that fact that the gray matter of our brain doesn’t contain much in the way of neurons using acetyl choline as a neurotransmitter.  What it does have is lots of neurons using GABA which we know can act on axons, inhibiting axon potential generation.  This has been well worked out with synapses where the axon emerges from the neuron cell body (the initial segment).  However the different ionic composition of axons in the developing brain results in GABA having an excitatory effect.  Perhaps ionic composition varies in different parts of the neuron.

The work was done in living animals, so the paper contains no electron micrographs.  Such work is sure to be done.  No classical presynaptic apparatus may be present, just two naked axons touching each other and interacting by ephaptic transmission (the term does not appear in the paper).

So a lot of work should be done, the first of which should be replication. As the late Carl Sagan said “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.

Finally:

As Mark Twain said ” There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”

 

The cell is not a bag of water

We have over 800 G protein coupled receptors (GPCRs).  We have not found 800 distinct intracellular messengers (such cyclic adenosine monophosphate — aka CAMP).  A single cell can express up to 100 GPCRS — Mol. Pharm. vol. 88 pp. 181 – 187 ’15.  Some of them raise CAMP levels, others decrease it.  CAMP is supposed to diffuse freely within the cell.  If so, different GPCRs which change cellular CAMP levels to the same extent they should produce identical effects. But they don’t.

One example — Isuprel stimulation of beta adrenergic GPCRs increases cardiac contractile force and activates glycogen metabolism.  Prostaglandin E1 (PGE1) GPCR causes the same CAMP increase without this effect.

A recent fascinating paper may explain why [ Cell vol. 185 pp. 1130 – 1142 ’22 ]  The authors had previously done work showing that under basal conditions CAMP is mostly bound to a protein (regulatory protein kinase A subunit — aka PKA RIalpha ) leading to very low concentrations of free CAMP.

So free diffusion occurs only if CAMP levels are elevated well above the number of binding sites for it.

As usual, to get new interesting results, new technology had to be used.  A biosensor for CAMP based on Forster Resonance Energy Transfer aka FRET —  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Förster_resonance_energy_transfer, was added to two different GPCRs — one for the Glucagon Like Peptide 1 (GLP1) and the other for the beta2 adrenergic receptor.

Even better, they fused the biosensor to the GPCRs using rulerlike  spacers each 300 Angstroms (30 nanoMeters) long.  So they could measure CAMP levels at 30 and 60 nanoMeters from the GPCR.  Levels were highest close to the receptor, but even at 30 and 60 nanoMeters away they were higher than the levels in the cytoplasm away from the cell membrane.  So this is pretty good evidence for what the authors call RAINs (Receptor Associated Independent camp Domains — God they love acronyms don’t they?).

Similar localized responses were seen with the beta2 adrenergic receptors, suggesting that RAINs might be a general phenomenon of GPCRs — but a lot more work is needed.

Even more interesting was the fact that there was no crosstalk between the RAINS of GLP1R and the beta2 adrenergic receptor.  Stimulation of one GPCR changed only the RAIN associated with it and didn’t travel to other RAINs

So the cell with its GPCRs resembles a neuron with its synapses on dendritic spines, where processing at each synapse remains fairly local before the neuron cell body integrates all of them.  It’s like Las Vegas — what happens at GPCR1 (synapse1) stays in GPCR1 (synapse1).  Well not quite, but you get the idea.

A totally unsuspected information processing mechanism in the brain

This is pretty hard core stuff for the neurophysiology, neuropharmacology and  neuroscience cognoscenti.  You can skip it if you’re satisfied with our understanding of how the brain works, and our current treatments for neurological and psychiatric disease.  You aren’t?  Join the club and read on.

We thought we pretty much understood axons.  They were wires conducting nerve impulses (action potentials) from the cell body to their far away ends, where the nerve impulses released neurotransmitters which then affected other neurons they were connected to by synapses.

We knew that there were two places on the axon where receptors for neurotransmitters were found, allowing other neurons to control what the axon did.  The first was the place where axon leaves the cell body, called the axon initial segment (AIS).  Some of them are controlled by the ends of chandelier cells — interneurons with elaborate specialized synapses called cartridges.   The second was on the axon terminals at the synapse — the presynapse.  Receptors for the transmitter to be released were found (autoreceptors) and for other neurotransmitters (such as the endocannabinoids (( our indigenous marihuana)) released by the presynaptic cell.

Enter a blockbuster paper from Science (volume 375 pp. 1378 – 1385 ’22) science.abn0532-2.pdf.  It shows (in one particular case) that the axons themselves have receptors for a particular transmitter (acetyl choline) which partly can control their behavior.  I sure people will start looking for this elsewhere. The case studied is of particular interest to the neurologist, because the axons are from dopamine releasing neurons in the striatum.  Death of these neurons causes parkinsonism.

The work used all sort of high technology including G Protein Coupled Receptors (GPCRs) highly modified so that when dopamine hit them a fluorescent compound attached to them lit up, permitting the local concentration of dopamine to be measured in the living brain.  Another such GPCR was used to measure local acetyl choline concentration.

The dopamine axons contain a nicotinic type receptor for acetyl choline.  Stimulation of the interneurons releasing acetyl choline caused a much larger release of dopamine (in an area estimated to contain 3 to 15 million dopamine axon terminals.  The area covered by dopamine release was 3 times larger than the area covered by acetyl choline release, implying that the acetyl choline was causing the axons to fire.

The cell body of the dopamine neuron had nothing to do with it, as the phenomenon was seen in brain slices of the striatum (which have no input from the dopamine cell bodies.

They could actually study all this in living animals, and unsurprisingly, there were effects on movement with increased striatal dopamine and acetyl choline being associated with movement of the animal to the opposite side.

So this is an entirely novel mechanism for the control of neural activity.  How widespread such a mechanism is awaits further study, as is whether it is affected in various diseases, and whether manipulation of it will do any good (or harm).

Exciting times.

 

 

The uses and abuses of molarity — II

Just as the last post showed why a 1 Molar solution of a protein makes no sense at all, it is reasonable to ask what the highest concentration of a single protein in the cellular environment could be. Strangely, it was very hard for me to find an estimate of the percentage of protein mass inside a eukaryotic cell. There is one for the red blood cell, which is essentially a bag of hemoglobin. The amount is 33 grams/deciliter or 330 grams/liter. Hemoglobin (which is a tetramer) has a molecular mass of 64,000 Daltons.  So that’s 330/64000 = .5 x 10^-3 Molar.   So all proteins in our cells have a maximum concentration at most in the milliMolar range.

Before moving on, how do you think the red blood cell gets its energy?  Amazingly it is by anaerobic glycolysis, not using the oxygen carried by hemoglobin at all.  Why? If it used oxidative phosphorylation which runs on oxygen, it would burn up.  That’s why red cells do not contain mitochondria. 

On to Kd the dissociation constant.  At least 475 FDA approved drugs target G Protein Coupled Receptors (GPCRs), and our genome codes for some 826 of them.  Almost 500 of them code for smell receptors, and of the 300 or so not involved with smell 1/3 are orphans (as of 2019) with no known ligand.  There are GPCRs for all neurotransmitters which is why neurologists and psychiatrists are very interested in them. 

The Kd is defined as [ free ligand ][ free receptor ]/ [ ligand bound to receptor]  where all the  [  ]’s are concentrations in Moles/liter (e.g. Molar concentrations). 

There’s the rub.  Kd makes sense when ligand and receptor are swimming around in solution, but GPCRs never do this.  The working GPCR is embedded in our cell membrane which topologists tell us are 2 dimensional manifolds embedded in 3 dimensional space.  What does concentration mean in a situation like this?  Think of the entropy involved in getting all the GPCRs to lie in a single plane.  Obviously not so simple.  

People get around this by using radioactive ligands, and embedding GPCRs in membranes and measuring the time for ligands to bind and unbind (e.g. kinetics), but this is miles away from the physiologic situations — for details please see

Mol Cell Endocrinol. 2019 Apr 5; 485: 9–19.

doi: 10.1016/j.mce.2019.01.018

 

The same is true for other proteins of interest — ion channels for the neurologist, hormone receptors for the endocrinologist, angiotension converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) for the pandemic virus.  

 

I think that all Kd’s of membrane embedded receptors do is give you an ordinal ordering (e.g. receptor A binds ligand B tighter than ligand C ) but not a quantitative one.

 

Next up, how a Nobel prizewinner totally misunderstood the nature and applicability of molarity and studies on a two dimensional gas (complete with Pressure * Area = n * Gas Constant * Temperature).

 

 

 

Cells are not bags of cytoplasm

How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree) is a song of 100+ years ago when World War I had just ended. In 1920, for the first time America was 50/50 urban/rural. Now it’s 82%.

What does this have to do with cellular biology? A lot. One of the first second messengers to be discovered was cyclic adenosine monophosphate (CAMP). It binds to an enzyme complex called protein kinase A (PKA), activating it, making it phosphorylate all sorts of proteins changing their activity. But PKA doesn’t float free in the cell. We have some 47 genes for proteins (called AKAPs for protein A Kinase Anchoring Protein) which bind PKA and localize it to various places in the cell. CAMP is made by an enzyme called adenyl cyclase of which we have 10 types, each localized to various places in the cell (because most of them are membrane embedded). We also have hundreds of G Protein Coupled Receptors (GPCRs) localized in various parts of the cell (apical, basal, primary cilia, adhesion structures etc. etc.) many of which when activated stimulate (by yet another complicated mechanism) adenyl cyclase to make CAMP.

So the cell tries to keep CAMP when it is formed relatively localized (down on the farm if you will). Why have all these ways of making it if its going to run all over the cell after all.

Actually the existence of localized signaling by CAMP is rather controversial, particularly when you can measure how fast it is moving around. All studies previous to Cell vol. 182 pp. 1379 – 1381, 1519 – 1530 ’20 found free diffusion of CAMP.

This study, found that CAMP (in low concentrations) was essentially immobile, remaining down on the farm where it was formed.

The authors used a fluorescent analog of CAMP which allowed them to use fluorescence fluctuation spectroscopy which gives the probability distribution function of an individual molecule occupying a given position in space and time (SpatioTemporal Image correlation Spectroscopy — STICS).

Fascinating as the study is, it is ligh tyears away from physiologic — the fluorescent CAMP analog was not formed by anything resembling a physiologic mechanism (e.g. by adenyl cyclase). A precursor to the fluorescent CAMP was injected into the cell and broken down by ‘intracellular esterases’ to form the fluorescent CAMP analog.

Then the authors constructed a protein made of three parts (1) a phosphodiesterase (PDE) which broke down the fluorescent CAMP analog and (2) another protein — the signaler — which fluoresced when it bound the CAMP analog. The two were connected by (3) a flexible protein linker e.g. the ‘ruler’ of the previous post. The ruler could be made of various lengths.

Then levels of fluorescent CAMP were obtained by injecting it into the cell, or stimulating a receptor.

If the sensor was 100 Angstroms away from the PDE, it never showed signs of CAMP, implying the the PDE was destroying it before it could get to the linker implying that diffusion was quite slow. This was at low concentrations of the fluorescent CAMP analog. At high injection concentrations the CAMP overcame the sites which were binding it in the cell and moved past the signaler.

It was a lot of work but it convincingly (to me) showed that CAMP doesn’t move freely in the cell unless it is of such high concentration that it overcomes the binding sites available to it.

They made another molecule containing (1) protein kinase A (2) a ruler (3) a phophodiesterase. If the kinase and phosphodiesterase were close enough together, CAMP never got to PKA at all.

Another proof that phosphodiesterase enzymes can create a zone where there is no free CAMP (although there is still some bound to proteins).

Hard stuff (to explain) but nonetheless impressive, and shows why we must consider the cell a bunch of tiny principalities jealously guarding their turf like medieval city states.

*****

A molecular ruler

Time to cleanse your mind by leaving the contentious world of social issues and entering the realm of pure thought with some elegant chemistry. 

You are asked to construct a molecular ruler with a persistence length of 150 Angstroms. 

Hint #1: use a protein

Hint #2; use alpha helices

Spoiler alert — nature got there first. 

The ruler was constructed and used in an interesting paper on CAMP nanoDomains (about which more on the next post).

It’s been around since 2011 [ Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. vol. 108 pp. 20467 – 20472 ’11 ] and I’m embarrassed to admit I’d never heard of it.

It’s basically a run of 4 negatively charged amino acids (glutamic acid or aspartic acid) followed by a run of 4 positively charged amino acids (lysine, arginine). This is a naturally occurring motif found in a variety of species. 

My initial (incorrect) thought was that this couldn’t work as the 4 positively charged amino acids would bend at the end and bind to the 4 negatively charged ones. This can’t work even if you make the peptide chain planar, as the positive charges would alternate sides on the planar peptide backbone.

Recall that there are 3.5 amino acids/turn of the alpha helix, meaning that between a run of 4 Glutamic acid/Aspartic acids and an adjacent run of 4 lysines/arginines, an ionic bond is certain to form between the side chains (and not between adjacent amino acids on the backbone, but probably one 3 or 4 amino acids away)

Since a complete turn of the alpha helix is only 5.4 Angstroms, a persistence length of 150 means about 28 turns of the helix using 28 * 3.5 = 98 amino acids or about 12 blocks of ++++—- charged amino acids. 

The beauty of the technique is that by starting with an 8 amino acid ++++—- block, you can add length to your ruler in 12 Angstrom increments. This is exactly what Cell vol. 182 pp. 1519 – 1530 ’20 did. But that’s for the next post. 

The perfect aphrodisiac ?

We’re off to London for a few weeks to celebrate our 50th Wedding Anniversary. As a parting gift to all you lovelorn organic chemists out there, here’s a drug target for a new aphrodisiac.

Yes, it’s yet another G Protein Coupled Receptor (GPCR) of which we have 800+ in our genome, and which some 30% of drugs usable in man target (but not this one).

You can read all about it in a leisurely review of “Affective Touch” in Neuron vol. 82 pp. 737 – 755 ’14, and Nature vol. 493 pp. 669 – 673 ’13. The receptor (if the physiological ligand is known the papers are silent about it) is found on a type of nerve going to hairy skin. It’s called MRGPRB4.

The following has been done in people. Needles were put in a cutaneous nerve, and skin was lightly stroked at rates between 1 and 10 centimeters/second. Some of the nerves respond at very high frequency 50 – 100 impulses/second (50 – 100 Hertz) to this stimulus. Individuals were asked to rate the pleasantness of the sensation produced. The most pleasant sensations produced the highest frequency responses of these nerves.

MRGPRB4 is found on nerves which respond like this (and almost nowhere else as far as is known), so a ligand for it should produce feelings of pleasure. The whole subject of proteins which produce effects when the cell carrying them is mechanically stimulated is fascinating. Much of the work has been done with the hair cells of the ear, which discharge when the hairs are displaced by sound waves. Proteins embedded in the hairs trigger an action potential when disturbed.

Perhaps there is no chemical stimulus for MRGPRB4, just as there isn’t for the hair cells, but even so it’s worth looking for some chemical which does turn on MRGPRB4. Perhaps a natural product already does this, and is in one of the many oils and lotions people apply to themselves. Think of the chemoattractants for bees and other insects.

If you’re the lucky soul who finds such a drug, fame and fortune (and perhaps more) is sure to be yours.

Happy hunting

Back in a few weeks