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A quantitative study of the synaptic alterations in spinal dorsal horn during the induction and maintenance of long-term potentiation

Xiang Xuying, Zhang Hongmei, Hu Nengwei, Zhou Lijun, Zhang Tong, Liu Xianguo

Department of Physiology, Zhongshan Medical School of Sun Yat-Sen University. Guangzhou 510089, China

Abstract

By using stereological morphometric techniques, we examined the ultrastructure of synapses in lamine Ⅱ of the spinal dorsal horn of Sprague Dawley rats 30 min, 3 h and 5 h after long-term potentiation (LTP) induction. We found that the numerical density per unit volume (Nv) of total synapses, the thickness of the postsynaptic density (PSD), width of the synaptic cleft increased significantly after the establishment of LTP. (1) Thirty minutes after the formation of LTP, the thickness of the PSD increased from 0.029±0.0064μm (control) to 0.036±0.009μm (P<0.05) and the width of the synaptic cleft increased from 0.0181±0.0024 μm (control) to 0.0197±0.0029μm (P<0.05); the number of synaptic vesicles decreased from 0.122±0.0l1/μm~2 to 0.085±0.010μm~2 (P<0.05); (2) 3 h after the formation of LTP, the thickness of PSD and the width of the synaptic cleft had no difference compared with those 30 min after LTP.

Key words: Long-term potentiation （LTP）;Spinal dorsal horn;Synapse

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Citing This Article：

Xiang Xuying, Zhang Hongmei, Hu Nengwei, Zhou Lijun, Zhang Tong, Liu Xianguo. A quantitative study of the synaptic alterations in spinal dorsal horn during the induction and maintenance of long-term potentiation. Acta Physiol Sin 2004; 56 (3): (in Chinese with English abstract).