Surprisingly, many synapses in the central nervous system can sustain synaptic activity upon high-frequency stimulation (Kopp-Scheinpflug et al., 2008, Kraushaar and Jonas, 2000, Lorteije et al., 2009 and Rancz et al., 2007). In order to maintain the fidelity

of synaptic transmission, synaptic vesicles (SVs) are required to undergo fast recycling to prevent depletion of the SV pool (Fernández-Alfonso EPZ-6438 mouse and Ryan, 2004 and Sudhof, 2004). Recently it has been reported that interfering with the function of endocytic proteins causes a fast, stimulation-frequency-dependent depression of SV exocytosis (Hosoi et al., 2009 and Kawasaki et al., 2000). As obvious explanation for such findings, the lack of release-ready SVs may be invoked due to absence of recycled SVs. However, some of these inhibitory effects developed so rapidly that they cannot be explained by the lack of release-ready SVs, since the reservoir of SVs should well be able to maintain release for longer periods. In this study we investigated vesicle exocytosis in cultured rat hippocampal neurons using synaptopHluorin (Miesenböck et al., 1998 and Sankaranarayanan

et al., 2000) in the presence of Folimycin, a potent and specific inhibitor of vesicular reacidification, that does not affect exo-endocytosis Selleck Panobinostat (Zhou et al., 2000). We demonstrate that upon mild stimulation no reuse of SVs occurs within 40 s and that recruitment of pre-existing PD184352 (CI-1040) SVs is fast enough to meet the needs of a high release rate. However, under the influence of the specific endocytosis inhibitor Dynasore (Macia et al., 2006) or the inhibitor of clathrin-mediated endocytosis Pitstop 2 (von Kleist et al., 2011) we observed a clear stimulation-frequency-dependent release depression. This probably reflects interference of these inhibitors with the process of rapid clearance of exocytosed SV components from the synaptic release sites. This notion was corroborated by the observation of acute vesicular protein accumulation around the release site using

dual-color STED nanoscopy. To reliably measure the level of synaptic release depression, we quantified the amount of exocytosis upon different stimulation strengths using synaptopHluorin (spH) in cultured hippocampal neurons (Miesenböck et al., 1998 and Sankaranarayanan et al., 2000). At presynaptic terminals expressing spH, exocytosis of SVs evoked by electric field stimulation (via action potentials, APs) led to dequenching of spH molecules in neutral extracellular buffer, resulting in an instantaneous fluorescence increase (Figure 1A). Under such experimental conditions, the fluorescence change is proportional to the amount of spH exocytosed. The absolute amplitude of the signal can differ, however, from cell to cell due to inhomogeneous expression of the probe and variation in release probability.