Role of Bassoon and Piccolo in Assembly and Molecular Organization of the Active Zone

Abstract

Bassoon and Piccolo are two very large scaffolding proteins of the cytomatrix assembled at the active zone (CAZ) where neurotransmitter is released. They share regions of high sequence similarity distributed along their entire length and seem to share both overlapping and distinct functions in organizing the CAZ. Here, we survey our present knowledge on protein-protein interactions and recent progress in understanding of molecular functions of these two giant proteins. These include roles in the assembly of active zones (AZ), the localization of voltage-gated Ca(2+) channels (VGCCs) in the vicinity of release sites, synaptic vesicle (SV) priming and in the case of Piccolo, a role in the dynamic assembly of the actin cytoskeleton. Piccolo and Bassoon are also important for the maintenance of presynaptic structure and function, as well as for the assembly of CAZ specializations such as synaptic ribbons. Recent findings suggest that they are also involved in the regulation activity-dependent communication between presynaptic boutons and the neuronal nucleus. Together these observations suggest that Bassoon and Piccolo use their modular structure to organize super-molecular complexes essential for various aspects of presynaptic function.

Keywords: Aczonin; Bassoon; Piccolo; actin dynamics; cytomatrix at the active zone; neurotransmitter release; synaptic vesicle; synapto-nuclear signaling.

Figure 1

Piccolo and Bassoon at presynaptic active zones (AZ). (A) Cryo-electron micrograph of an excitatory synapse from rat brain (originally published in Rostaing et al., ; size bar, 200 nm). (B) Schematic organization of SVs within presynaptic boutons with SVs in the reserve pool tethered together via synapsin and those in the docked pool embedded in the CAZ (red filaments). (C) Schematic of CAZ molecules directing the clustering, translocation, docking, positional and molecular priming and fusion of SVs. (D) In-silico modeling of Bassoon and Piccolo structures with docking sites for binding partners color coded. The structures include X-ray and NMR data for Znf [protein data bank (Berman et al., 2000), PDB entry: 1ZBD], PDZ (1UJD), coiled-coil (3QH9 and Gruber and Lupas, 2003) and C2 (1RH8, 5CCG) domains. Piccolo C-terminus has been arranged similar to synaptotagmin (Zhou et al., 2015). Most of the remaining parts contain proline and glycine residues that prevent persistent folding but build compact distorted domains (Quiroz and Chilkoti, 2015), while the homologs coiled-coil helices elongate both proteins to about 80 nm. These domains were modeled ab initio using threading (Kelley and Sternberg, 2009) and BLAST routines (Sauder and Dunbrack, 2000) and visualized using PyMOL (https://www.pymol.org). For further details compare Table 1. Abbreviations: PSD, postsynaptic density; SV, synaptic vesicle; RRP, release-ready SV pool; CAZ, cytomatrix assembled at the active zone.