Brevican distinctively assembles extracellular components at the large diameter nodes of Ranvier in the CNS

Abstract

Brevican is known to be an abundant extracellular matrix component in the adult brain and a structural constituent of perineuronal nets. We herein show that brevican, tenascin-R (TN-R) and phosphacan are present at the nodes of Ranvier on myelinated axons with a particularly large diameter in the central nervous system. A brevican deficiency resulted in a reorganization of the nodal matrices, which was characterized by the shift of TN-R, and concomitantly phosphacan, from an axonal diameter-dependent association with nodes to an axonal diameter independent association. Supported by the co-immunoprecipitation results, these observations indicate that the presence of TN-R and phosphacan at nodes is normally brevican-dependent, while in the absence of brevican these molecules can also be recruited by versican V2. The versican V2 and Bral1 distribution was not affected, thus indicating a brevican-independent role of these two molecules for establishing hyaluronan-binding matrices at the nodes. Our results revealed that brevican plays a crucial role in determining the specialization of the hyaluronan-binding nodal matrix assemblies in large diameter nodes.