TY - JOUR T1 - Prevalent Presence of Periodic Actin-spectrin-based Membrane Skeleton in a Broad Range of Neuronal Cell Types and Animal Species JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/045856 SP - 045856 AU - Jiang He AU - Ruobo Zhou AU - Zhuhao Wu AU - Monica Carrasco AU - Peri Kurshan AU - Jonathan Farley AU - David Simon AU - Guiping Wang AU - Boran Han AU - Junjie Hao AU - Evan Heller AU - Marc Freeman AU - Kang Shen AU - Tom Maniatis AU - Marc Tessier-Lavigne AU - Xiaowei Zhuang Y1 - 2016/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/04/08/045856.abstract N2 - Actin, spectrin and associated molecules form a periodic, sub-membrane cytoskeleton in the axons of neurons. For a better understanding of this membrane-associated periodic skeleton (MPS), it is important to address how prevalent this structure is in different neuronal types, different subcellular compartments, and across different animal species. Here, we investigated the organization of spectrin in a variety of neuronal and glial-cell types. We observed the presence of MPS in all of the tested neuronal types cultured from mouse central and peripheral nervous systems, including excitatory and inhibitory neurons from several brain regions, as well as sensory and motor neurons. Quantitative analyses show that MPS is preferentially formed in axons in all neuronal types tested here: spectrin shows a long-range, periodic distribution throughout all axons, but only appears periodic in a small fraction of dendrites, typically in the form of isolated patches in sub-regions of these dendrites. As in dendrites, we also observed patches of periodic spectrin structures in a small fraction of glial-cell processes in four types of glial cells cultured from rodent tissues. Interestingly, despite its strong presence in the axonal shaft, MPS is absent in most presynaptic boutons, but is present in a substantial fraction of dendritic spine necks, including some projecting from dendrites where such a periodic structure is not observed in the shaft. Finally, we found that spectrin is capable of adopting a similar periodic organization in neurons of a variety of animal species, including Caenorhabditis elegans, Drosophila, Gallus gallus, Mus musculus and Homo sapiens. ER -