Neurotransmitters in the Brain Cluster Like Water and Oil

Mechanism of Aggregation Between Neurotransmitter Vesicles in the Brain Revealed

[Asia Economy Reporter Junho Hwang] The reason why synaptic vesicles, which store neurotransmitters in nerve cells in our brain, cluster together has been revealed. It has been proven through international collaborative research that, like water and oil, they each maintain fluidity as liquids due to liquid-liquid phase separation but cluster together without mixing. This research is expected to advance studies on neurological disorders to a new level.

The National Research Foundation of Korea announced that Professor Seongho Jang's research team at Seoul National University collaborated with a research team from Yale University in the United States to identify the aggregation principle between neurotransmitter vesicles in the brain. The research results were published on the 11th in the international journal Nature Communications.

Nerve cells in the brain store neurotransmitters in small vesicles called synaptic vesicles. When nerve cells are stimulated, these vesicles fuse with the cell membrane and release the neurotransmitters inside, enabling nerve transmission to the next nerve cell. However, at rest without stimulation, synaptic vesicles cluster together, but the underlying principle was not well understood.

The research team hypothesized that synaptic vesicles aggregate due to a liquid-liquid phase separation phenomenon, where they each maintain fluidity as liquids but do not mix, similar to mixing water and oil. They then identified that the interaction between two proteins abundant in synaptic vesicles, Synaptophysin and Synapsin, plays a decisive role in inducing the liquid-liquid phase separation of synaptic vesicles. Furthermore, they developed a technique to replicate the synaptic vesicle aggregation structure, previously observed only in nerve cells, in non-neuronal cells using this principle.

The research team stated, "We identified two important proteins that cause self-aggregation between synaptic vesicles," and added, "The technology to reproduce synaptic vesicle aggregation structures in non-neuronal cells using these proteins is expected to greatly aid future basic neuroscience research and related neurological disorder studies."

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