Endocannabinoid signaling enhances visual responses through modulation of intracellular chloride levels in retinal ganglion cells
- McGill University, Canada
- Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Québec, Canada
- Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, United States
- University of La Verne, United States
Abstract
Type 1 cannabinoid receptors (CB1Rs) are widely expressed in the vertebrate retina but the role of endocannabinoids in vision is not fully understood. Here we identified a novel mechanism underlying a CB1R-mediated increase in retinal ganglion cell (RGC) intrinsic excitability acting through AMPK-dependent inhibition of NKCC1 activity. Clomeleon imaging and patch clamp recordings revealed that inhibition of NKCC1 downstream of CB1R activation reduces intracellular Cl- levels in RGCs, hyperpolarizing the resting membrane potential. We confirmed that such hyperpolarization enhances RGC action potential firing in response to subsequent depolarization, consistent with the increased intrinsic excitability of RGCs observed with CB1R activation. Using a dot avoidance assay in freely swimming Xenopus tadpoles we demonstrate that CB1R activation markedly improves visual contrast sensitivity under low light conditions. These results highlight a role for endocannabinoids in vision, and present a novel mechanism for cannabinoid modulation of neuronal activity through Cl- regulation.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Santé (research chair, postdoctoral fellowship)
- Jennifer Tsui
- Delphine Gobert
- Edward S Ruthazer
Canadian Institutes of Health Research (operating grants)
- Edward S Ruthazer
Epilepsie Canada (postdoctoral award)
- Loïs S Miraucourt
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: This study was performed in strict accordance with the recommendations in the Canadian Council on Animal Care. All animals were handled according to animal care committee protocols (#5071) approved by the Animal Care Committees of the Montreal Neurological Institute and McGill University.
Copyright
© 2016, Miraucourt et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 6,488
- views
-
- 673
- downloads
-
- 15
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Endocannabinoid signaling enhances visual responses through modulation of intracellular chloride levels in retinal ganglion cells
eLife 5:e15932.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.15932
Further reading
-
- Neuroscience
One of the most fundamental laws of physics is the principle of least action. Motivated by its predictive power, we introduce a neuronal least-action principle for cortical processing of sensory streams to produce appropriate behavioral outputs in real time. The principle postulates that the voltage dynamics of cortical pyramidal neurons prospectively minimizes the local somato-dendritic mismatch error within individual neurons. For output neurons, the principle implies minimizing an instantaneous behavioral error. For deep network neurons, it implies the prospective firing to overcome integration delays and correct for possible output errors right in time. The neuron-specific errors are extracted in the apical dendrites of pyramidal neurons through a cortical microcircuit that tries to explain away the feedback from the periphery, and correct the trajectory on the fly. Any motor output is in a moving equilibrium with the sensory input and the motor feedback during the ongoing sensory-motor transform. Online synaptic plasticity reduces the somatodendritic mismatch error within each cortical neuron and performs gradient descent on the output cost at any moment in time. The neuronal least-action principle offers an axiomatic framework to derive local neuronal and synaptic laws for global real-time computation and learning in the brain.
-
- Cell Biology
- Neuroscience
Sorting nexin 4 (SNX4) is an evolutionary conserved organizer of membrane recycling. In neurons, SNX4 accumulates in synapses, but how SNX4 affects synapse function remains unknown. We generated a conditional SNX4 knock-out mouse model and report that SNX4 cKO synapses show enhanced neurotransmission during train stimulation, while the first evoked EPSC was normal. SNX4 depletion did not affect vesicle recycling, basic autophagic flux, or the levels and localization of SNARE-protein VAMP2/synaptobrevin-2. However, SNX4 depletion affected synapse ultrastructure: an increase in docked synaptic vesicles at the active zone, while the overall vesicle number was normal, and a decreased active zone length. These effects together lead to a substantially increased density of docked vesicles per release site. In conclusion, SNX4 is a negative regulator of synaptic vesicle docking and release. These findings suggest a role for SNX4 in synaptic vesicle recruitment at the active zone.
