Imaging PKA Activation Inside Neurons in Brain Slice Preparations

Marina Brito , Elvire Guiot , Pierre Vincent (1)

1 ICSN - Intégration cellulaire des Signaux Neuromodulateurs

Cyclic-AMP dependent protein kinase (PKA) is present in most branches of the living kingdom, and as an example in the nervous system where PKA integrates the cellular effects of various neuromodulators. The recent development of fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) biosensors such as AKAR now allows a direct measurement of PKA activation in living cells by simply ratioing the fluorescence emission at the CFP and YFP wavelength. This novel approach provides data with a temporal resolution of a few seconds at the cellular and even sub-cellular level, opening a new possibility for understanding the integration processes in space and time. Our protocol was optimized to study morphologically intact mature neurons and we describe how simple and cheap wide-field imaging as well as more elaborate two-photon imaging allow real-time monitoring of PKA activation in pyramidal cortical neurons in neonate rodent brain slices. In addition, many practical details presented here also pertain to image analysis in other cellular preparations such as cultured cells. This protocol also applies to the various other CFP–YFP-based FRET biosensors for other kinases or other intracellular signals, and it is likely that this kind of approach will generalize in a near future.

Domaines: Biologie cellulaire

Marina Brito, Elvire Guiot, Pierre Vincent. Imaging PKA Activation Inside Neurons in Brain Slice Preparations. Mukai, Hideyuki. Protein Kinase Technologies, 68, Humana Press, pp.237-250, 2012, Neuromethods, 978-1-61779-823-8 978-1-61779-824-5. ⟨10.1007/978-1-61779-824-5_13⟩. ⟨hal-01545407⟩