Endocytic trafficking determines cellular tolerance of presynaptic opioid signaling

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Abstract

Opioid tolerance is well described physiologically but its mechanistic basis remains incompletely understood. An important site of opioid action in vivo is the presynaptic terminal, where opioids inhibit transmitter release. This response characteristically resists desensitization over minutes yet becomes gradually tolerant over hours, and how this is possible remains unknown. Here we delineate a cellular mechanism underlying this longer-term form of opioid tolerance in cultured rat medium spiny neurons. Our results support a model in which presynaptic tolerance is mediated by a gradual depletion of cognate receptors from the axon surface through iterative rounds of receptor endocytosis and recycling. For the μ-opioid receptor (MOR), we show that the agonist-induced endocytic process which initiates iterative receptor cycling requires GRK2/3-mediated phosphorylation of the receptor's cytoplasmic tail, and that partial or biased agonist drugs with reduced ability to drive phosphorylation-dependent endocytosis in terminals produce correspondingly less presynaptic tolerance. We then show that the δ-opioid receptor (DOR) conforms to the same general paradigm except that presynaptic endocytosis of DOR, in contrast to MOR, does not require phosphorylation of the receptor's cytoplasmic tail. Further, we show that DOR recycles less efficiently than MOR in axons and, consistent with this, that DOR tolerance develops more strongly. Together, these results delineate a cellular basis for the development of presynaptic tolerance to opioids and describe a methodology useful for investigating presynaptic neuromodulation more broadly.

Data availability

Supplementary files Figure 1- 6 contain the numerical data used to generate the figures. All codes and sample data are available on the repository https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6954811

The following data sets were generated

(2022) Supplementary data, methods and analysis scripts from: Endocytic trafficking determines cellular tolerance of presynaptic opioid signaling
10.5281/zenodo.7226372.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6954811

Article and author information

Author details

Damien Jullié

Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, United States

For correspondence
Damien.Jullie@ucsf.edu

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Camila Benitez

Tetrad graduate program, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Tracy A Knight

Tetrad graduate program, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Milos S Simic

Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Mark von Zastrow

Tetrad graduate program, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, United States

For correspondence
mark@vzlab.org

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-1375-6926

Funding

National Institutes of Health (DA012864)

Mark von Zastrow

National Institutes of Health (DA010711)

Mark von Zastrow

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Animal experimentation: All procedures were performed according to the National Institutes of Health Guide for Care and Use of Laboratory Animals and approved by the University of California San Francisco Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (protocol number AN185688).

Copyright

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.