April 19, 2013

First steps of synapse building captured in live zebra fish embryos




Using spinning disk microscopy on barely day-old zebra fish embryos, University of Oregon scientists have gained a new window on how synapse-building components move to worksites in the central nervous system.

What researchers captured in these see-through embryos — in what may be one of the first views of early glutamate-driven synapse formation in a living vertebrate — were orderly movements of protein-carrying packets along axons to a specific site where a synapse would be formed.