PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Chao Sun
AU  - Andreas Nold
AU  - Tatjana Tchumatchenko
AU  - Mike Heilemann
AU  - Erin M. Schuman
TI  - The Spatial Scale of Synaptic Protein Allocation during Homeostatic Plasticity
AID  - 10.1101/2020.04.29.068833
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.04.29.068833
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/04/30/2020.04.29.068833.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/04/30/2020.04.29.068833.full
AB  - An individual neuron hosts up to 10,000 individual synapses that can be made stronger or weaker by local and cell-wide plasticity mechanisms, both of which require protein synthesis. To address over what spatial scale a neuron allocates synaptic resources, we quantified the distribution of newly synthesized proteins after global homeostatic upscaling using metabolic labeling and single-molecule localization (DNA-PAINT). Following upscaling, we observed a global increase in locally synthesized nascent protein in synapses and at dendrites, with a high degree of variability between individual synapses. We determined the smallest spatial scale over which nascent proteins were evenly distributed and found that it is best described by synaptic neighborhoods (~ 10 microns in length)-smaller than a dendritic branch and larger than an individual synapse. Protein allocation at the level of neighborhoods thus represents a solution to the problem of protein allocation within a neuron that balances local autonomy and global homeostasis.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.