A study detailing how glutamate signals work in the brain to enable neuronal communication

Glutamate is the most powerful substance in the human brain for neuronal communication. This is the most plentiful, and is engaged in all sorts of work.

Among the most striking are the slow restructuring of cloud networks as a result of learning and memory building, a process known as synaptic plasticity. Glutamate also has a deep clinical interest: After a stroke or brain injury and in neurodegenerative disease, glutamate can accumulate to toxic levels outside neurons and damage or kill them.

Shigeki Watanabe of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, an expert face at a marine biological laboratory (MBL) as a faculty member and researcher, is hot on the way to describing how glutamate signals are work in the brain to enable neuronal communication.

In a paper last fall, Watanabe (along with several MBL Neurobiology course students) described how glutamate is released from neural synapses after the neuron fires. And today, Watanabe published a follow-up study in Nature Communication.

With this paper, we find out how signals are moved across synapses to reverse the conversion for plasticity. We test that glutamate is first released near AMPA-type glutamate receptors, to send the signal back from one neuron to the next, and then near NMDA-type receptors immediately after its release. first signal to activate the inversion for synaptic plasticity. “

Shigeki Watanabe, Researcher, School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University

This new study was also partially conducted in the MBL Neurobiology course, of which Watanabe is a faculty member. “It started in 2018 with (course students) Raul Ramos and Hanieh Falahati, and then we followed in 2019 with Stephen Alexander Lee and Christine Prater. Shuo Li, the first author, was my teaching assistant for her Neurobiology course for two years, “Watanabe says. He will be returning to the MBL in the summer to teach the course – and find out more.