Pathophysiologic implications of intermediate filament (IF) proteins up-regulation in astrocytes remain incompletely understood. We studied whether the trafficking of recycling vesicles and endosomes/lysosomes depends on IFs. The findings show that astrocyte IFs differentially affect mobility of vesicles in WT astrocytes and in glial fibrillary acidic protein and vimentin deficient astrocytes; the most prominent changes were observed in endosomes/lysosomes. We propose that up-regulation of IFs in pathologic states may alter the function of astrocytes by deregulating vesicle trafficking.
The increasingly appreciated role of astrocytes in neurophysiology dictates a thorough understanding of the mechanisms underlying the communication between astrocytes and neurons. The vesicle labeling and the vesicle mobility properties may be an artifact of cell culture conditions, therefore we compared these parameters in brain tissue slices. With two-photon microscopy we studied the traffic of glutamatergic vesicles and peptidergic granules. We report that their mobility parameters are similar to those reported previously in cultured astrocytes.
COBISS.SI-ID: 26269401