Actin, spectrin and associated proteins form a periodic cytoskeletal structure in axons

By Ke-shu Xu, Guisheng Zhong, X. Zhuang. Science, 2012

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Axonal Actin How actin is organized in the axons and dendrites of neurons is largely unknown. Xu et al. (p. 452, published online 13 December) imaged actin in axons and dendrites using stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy. Surprisingly, while actin in dendrites formed long filaments, the actin in axons was organized into evenly spaced ringlike structures at the axon circumference. Spectrin, which is known to interact with actin to form a membrane cytoskeleton in erythrocytes, formed periodic structures that alternated with those of actin. This actin-spectrin cytoskeletal structure might give mechanical support to axons and could also organize other membrane proteins. Superresolution microscopy reveals a membrane cytoskeleton in neurons comprising rings of actin separated by spectrin. Actin and spectrin play important roles in neurons, but their organization in axons and dendrites remains unclear. We used stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy to study the organization of actin, spectrin, and associated proteins in neurons. Actin formed ringlike structures that wrapped around the circumference of axons and were evenly spaced along axonal shafts with a periodicity of ~180 to 190 nanometers. This periodic structure was not observed in dendrites, which instead contained long actin filaments running along dendritic shafts. Adducin, an actin-capping protein, colocalized with the actin rings. Spectrin exhibited periodic structures alternating with those of actin and adducin, and the distance between adjacent actin-adducin rings was comparable to the length of a spectrin tetramer. Sodium channels in axons were distributed in a periodic pattern coordinated with the underlying actin-spectrin–based cytoskeleton.

Subfields: Biophysics, Cell Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1633eb8f692308ad9f06815a82a0a0db48e53c47

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Citations in the corpus

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