Environmental enrichment enhances patterning and remodeling of synaptic nanoarchitecture as revealed by STED nanoscopy
Abstract
Synaptic plasticity underlies long-lasting structural and functional changes to brain circuitry and its experience-dependent remodeling can be fundamentally enhanced by environmental enrichment. It is however unknown, whether and how the environmental enrichment alters the morphology and dynamics of individual synapses. Here, we present a virtually crosstalk-free two-color in vivo STED microscope to simultaneously superresolve the dynamics of endogenous PSD95 of the post-synaptic density and spine geometry in the mouse cortex. In general, the spine head geometry and PSD95 assemblies were highly dynamic, their changes depended linearly on their original size but correlated only mildly. With environmental enrichment, the size distributions of PSD95 and spine head sizes were sharper than in controls, indicating that synaptic strength is set more uniformly. The topography of the PSD95 nanoorganization was more dynamic after environmental enrichment; changes in size were smaller but more correlated than in mice housed in standard cages. Thus, two-color in vivo time-lapse imaging of synaptic nanoorganization uncovers a unique synaptic nanoplasticity associated with the enhanced learning capabilities under environmental enrichment.
Data availability
Source data files of all analysed data are included in the submission.
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Author details
Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (EXC171)
- Waja Wegner
- Heinz Steffens
- Katrin I Willig
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (EXC 2067/1- 390729940)
- Carola Gregor
- Katrin I Willig
Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences (Open Access Funding)
- Waja Wegner
- Heinz Steffens
- Carola Gregor
- Katrin I Willig
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: Experiments were performed according to the guidelines of the national law regarding animal protection procedures and were approved by the responsible authorities, the Niedersächsisches Landesamt für Verbraucherschutz (LAVES, identification number 33.9-42502-04-14/1463). All surgery and imaging was performed under anesthesia, and all efforts were made to minimize animal suffering and the number of animals used.
Reviewing Editor
- Yukiko Goda, RIKEN, Japan
Version history
- Preprint posted: October 23, 2020 (view preprint)
- Received: September 3, 2021
- Accepted: February 22, 2022
- Accepted Manuscript published: February 23, 2022 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: March 8, 2022 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2022, Wegner 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.
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