Fast calcium transients in dendritic spines driven by extreme statistics

Authors:

Basnayake, K., Mazaud, D., Bemelmans, A., Rouach, N., Korkotian, E., & Holcman, D.

Keywords:

Neuronal dendrites, Head, Neck, Endoplasmic reticulum , Calcium signaling, Hippocampus, Glutamate, Signal amplification

Abstract:

Fast calcium transients (<10 ms) remain difficult to analyse in cellular microdomains, yet they can modulate key cellular events such as trafficking, local ATP production by endoplasmic reticulum-mitochondria complex (ER-mitochondria complex), or spontaneous activity in astrocytes. In dendritic spines receiving synaptic inputs, we show here that in the presence of a spine apparatus (SA), which is an extension of the smooth ER, a calcium-induced calcium release (CICR) is triggered at the base of the spine by the fastest calcium ions arriving at a Ryanodyne receptor (RyR). The mechanism relies on the asymmetric distributions of RyRs and sarco/ER calcium-ATPase (SERCA) pumps that we predict using a computational model and further confirm experimentally in culture and slice hippocampal neurons. The present mechanism for which the statistics of the fastest particles arriving at a small target, followed by an amplification, is likely to be generic in molecular transduction across cellular microcompartments, such as thin neuronal processes, astrocytes, endfeets, or protrusions.

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