Poster exhibited at GPSC Student Showcase, February 24th, 2016, University of Arizona. Recipient of the 2016 Katheryne B. Willock Library Research Award. / The nervous system is composed of two types of cells: neurons and glia. In neuronal circuits, neurons communicate through synapses and glia play a crucial modulatory role. To modulate chemical reuptake, glia send processes close to synapses and many glia directly appose or ensheathe a synapse. This structural motif is one of the elements often included in describing a vertebrate tripartite synapse, which includes a bidirectional functional neuron-glia relationship. The exact nature of this neuron-glia communication is not well understood.
In the invertebrate fruit fly, we have also found that particular neurons and glia also have a bidirectional functional relationship. This allows us to ask new questions about glial morphology. Throughout multiple images, I identified particular neuronal synapses and surrounding glia. After creating a 3D reconstruction, I measured the distance between a particular neuronal synapse and its closest glial process. Interestingly, the neuronal synapses were not directly apposed or ensheathed by glia, and the distance to the closest glial process varied one-hundred-fold. With variable distance, functional communication is consistently present. These findings provide important insight into invertebrate neuron-glia communication, and offer new avenues to investigate the structural neuron-glia relationships that are required for reciprocal signaling between the two cell classes.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:arizona.edu/oai:arizona.openrepository.com:10150/603647 |
| Date | 24 February 2016 |
| Creators | Liu, Kendra, MacNamee, Sarah, Gerhard, Stephen, Fetter, Richard, Cardona, Albert, Tolbert, Leslie, Oland, Lynne |
| Contributors | University of Arizona Department of Neuroscience, Undergraduate Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science, HHMI Janelia Research Campus, Institute of Neuroinformatics, Zurich, Switzerland |
| Source Sets | University of Arizona |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright © is held by the author. |
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