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  • Differential Co-release of Two Neurotransmitters from a Vesicle Fusion Pore in Mammalian Adrenal Chromaffin Cells.

Differential Co-release of Two Neurotransmitters from a Vesicle Fusion Pore in Mammalian Adrenal Chromaffin Cells.

Neuron (2019-02-19)
Quanfeng Zhang, Bin Liu, Qihui Wu, Bing Liu, Yinglin Li, Suhua Sun, Yuan Wang, Xi Wu, Zuying Chai, Xiaohan Jiang, Xiaoyao Liu, Meiqin Hu, Yeshi Wang, Yunting Yang, Li Wang, Xinjiang Kang, Yingfei Xiong, Yang Zhou, Xiaoke Chen, Lianghong Zheng, Bo Zhang, Changhe Wang, Feipeng Zhu, Zhuan Zhou
ABSTRACT

Co-release of multiple neurotransmitters from secretory vesicles is common in neurons and neuroendocrine cells. However, whether and how the transmitters co-released from a single vesicle are differentially regulated remains unknown. In matrix-containing dense-core vesicles (DCVs) in chromaffin cells, there are two modes of catecholamine (CA) release from a single DCV: quantal and sub-quantal. By combining two microelectrodes to simultaneously record co-release of the native CA and ATP from a DCV, we report that (1) CA and ATP were co-released during a DCV fusion; (2) during kiss-and-run (KAR) fusion, the co-released CA was sub-quantal, whereas the co-released ATP was quantal; and (3) knockdown and knockout of the DCV matrix led to quantal co-release of both CA and ATP even in KAR mode. These findings strongly imply that, in contrast to sub-quantal CA release in chromaffin cells, fast synaptic transmission without transmitter-matrix binding is mediated exclusively via quantal release in neurons.