Evidence That Post-Tetanic Potentiation Is Mediated by Neuropeptide Release in Aplysia

Many neuromuscular and central synapses exhibit activity-dependent plasticity. The sustained high-frequency firing needed to elicit some forms of plasticity are similar to those often required to release neuropeptides. We wanted to determine if neuropeptide release could contribute to post-tetanic potentiation (PTP) and chose neuromuscular synapses in buccal muscle I3a to explore this issue. This muscle is innervated by two motor neurons (termed B3 and B38) that show PTP in response to tetanic stimulation. B3 and B38 use glutamate as their fast transmitter but express different modulatory neuropeptides. B3 expresses FMRFamide, a neuropeptide that only slightly increases its own excitatory junction potentials (EJPs). B38 expresses the small cardioactive peptide (SCP), a neuropeptide that dramatically increases its own EJPs. It was our hypothesis that SCP released from B38's terminals during tetanic stimulation mediated a component of PTP for B38. Because no antagonist to SCP currently exists, we used several indirect approaches to test this hypothesis. First, we studied the effects of increasing stimulation frequency during the tetanus or lowering temperature on PTP. Both of these changes are known to dramatically increase SCP release. We found that increasing the frequency of stimulation increased PTP for both neurons; however, the effects were larger for B38. Decreasing the temperature tended to reduce PTP for B3, while increasing PTP for B38. These results were consistent with known properties of SCP release from B38. Next we selectively superfused the neuromuscular synapses with exogenous SCP to determine if this would occlude the effects of SCP released from B38 during a tetanus. We found that exogenous SCP dramatically reduced PTP for B38 but had little effect on PTP for B3. Thus our results support the hypothesis that physiological stimulation of B38 elicits PTP that is predominantly dependent on the release of SCP from its own terminals. They also demonstrate that the mechanisms underlying PTP can be very different for two motor neurons innervating the same target muscle.