Nature Neuroscience University of Science and Technology of China/Shenzhen Advanced Institute of Chinese Academy of Sciences Bi Guoqiang team deciphers the organization rules of receptor proteins in inhibitory nerve synapses

Recently, the team of Bi Guoqiang and Liu Beiming, double-appointed professors from the Hefei National Research Center for Microscale Matter Science of the University of Science and Technology of China, the School of Life Sciences, and the Institute of Brain Cognition and Brain Diseases, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Zhou Zhenghong from the University of California, Los Angeles, USA Through the development of cutting-edge cryo-electron microscopy tomography three-dimensional imaging technology, breakthroughs have been made in the research on the molecular structure and function of neural synapses

The synapse is the most basic structural and functional unit for information transmission and storage among many neurons in the brain

Professor Bi Guoqiang has been focusing on the development of cutting-edge microscopic imaging technology for synapse, neural network and whole-brain-scale analysis for many years .

On this basis, the research team developed a subregional image processing method based on oversampling and automatic classification for cryo-EM tomography 3D imaging.

Figure 1.

The self-organized form of receptor molecules and scaffold proteins in inhibitory synapses makes synapses both stable and variable.

Figure 2.

( Photo copyright: Tao Changlu, Liu Yuntao, Bi Guoqiang; Photo production: Wang Guoyan, Ma Yanbing ) 

The co-first authors of this paper are doctoral students Liu Yuntao (now a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA) and Tao Changlu (now an associate researcher at the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences) from the Hefei National Research Center for Microscale.

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