Abstract
Exocytosis, the fusion of secretory vesicles with the plasma membrane to allow release of the contents of the vesicles into the extracellular environment, and endocytosis, the internalization of these vesicles to allow another round of secretion, are coupled. It is, however, uncertain whether exocytosis and endocytosis are tightly coupled, such that secretory vesicles fuse only transiently with the plasma membrane before being internalized (the ‘kiss-and-run’ mechanism), or whether endocytosis occurs by an independent process following complete incorporation of the secretory vesicle into the plasma membrane. Here we investigate the fate of single secretory vesicles after fusion with the plasma membrane by measuring capacitance changes and transmitter release in rat chromaffin cells using the cell-attached patch-amperometry technique. We show that raised concentrations of extracellular calcium ions shift the preferred mode of exocytosis to the kiss-and-run mechanism in a calcium-concentration-dependent manner. We propose that, during secretion of neurotransmitters at synapses, the mode of exocytosis is modulated by calcium to attain optimal conditions for coupled exocytosis and endocytosis according to synaptic activity.
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Acknowledgements
We thank J. L. Romero for technical assistance and D. Mir for comments on the manuscript. This work was supported by grants from the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Cultura (DGES; to G.A.T.), from the Junta de Andalucia (to L.T.), and by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (to M.L.). E.A. was supported by a fellowship from DGES.
Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to G.A.T.
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Alés, E., Tabares, L., Poyato, J. et al. High calcium concentrations shift the mode of exocytosis to the kiss-and-run mechanism. Nat Cell Biol 1, 40–44 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/9012
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/9012
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