| First Author | Yap K | Year | 2020 |
| Journal | Elife | Volume | 9 |
| PubMed ID | 33275099 | Mgi Jnum | J:325528 |
| Mgi Id | MGI:6727722 | Doi | 10.7554/eLife.62944 |
| Citation | Yap K, et al. (2020) The actin-modulating protein synaptopodin mediates long-term survival of dendritic spines. Elife 9:e62944 |
| abstractText | Large spines are stable and important for memory trace formation. The majority of large spines also contains synaptopodin (SP), an actin-modulating and plasticity-related protein. Since SP stabilizes F-actin, we speculated that the presence of SP within large spines could explain their long lifetime. Indeed, using 2-photon time-lapse imaging of SP-transgenic granule cells in mouse organotypic tissue cultures we found that spines containing SP survived considerably longer than spines of equal size without SP. Of note, SP-positive (SP+) spines that underwent pruning first lost SP before disappearing. Whereas the survival time courses of SP+ spines followed conditional two-stage decay functions, SP-negative (SP-) spines and all spines of SP-deficient animals showed single-phase exponential decays. This was also the case following afferent denervation. These results implicate SP as a major regulator of long-term spine stability: SP clusters stabilize spines, and the presence of SP indicates spines of high stability. |
