Denser gephyrin packing is likely accompanied by an increased stability of the synaptic scaffold, as seen in the developmental reduction of the gephyrin exchange kinetics shown in a recent study (Vlachos et al., 2012). However, PALM imaging revealed that the internal structure of gephyrin clusters has an additional level of organization. Many of the larger gephyrin clusters are composed of subdomains that are separated by areas with low gephyrin concentrations. Inhibitory synapses with different levels of complexity have also been observed by EM (Triller and Korn, 1982). That some synapses with segmented PSDs are apposed to separate pools of synaptic
vesicles means that they may be considered as independent entities (Lushnikova et al., 2011). Accordingly, dynamic PALM imaging revealed that the subclusters Baf-A1 supplier of gephyrin change their relative positions on a time scale of minutes. These rearrangements may correspond with the splitting and merging of gephyrin clusters as observed frequently during time-lapse imaging (Dobie and Craig,
2011). The morphology of inhibitory PSDs appears to play a role in the homeostatic regulation of inhibitory synapses. Both size and complexity of inhibitory PSDs increase in response to excitatory synaptic plasticity (Nusser et al., 1998, Bourne and Harris, 2011 and Lushnikova et al., 2011). This is likely paralleled by functional changes, since the size of the PSD determines the receptor levels at see more inhibitory synapses (Nusser et al., 1997, Lim et al., 1999 and Kasugai et al., 2010). In agreement with these findings, our PALM/STORM data show a close match between the distribution of gephyrin and GlyRs at spinal cord synapses. The 3D data, in particular, illustrate the correspondence between mEos2-gephyrin clusters and GlyR localization. The comparison of endogenous
receptor densities (1,250 pentameric GABAAR complexes μm−2 in cerebellar stellate cells; Nusser et al., 1997) with the measured gephyrin densities (∼5,000 μm−2 at GlyRα1-negative cortical synapses) suggests that the receptors may actually occupy a high proportion of the available binding sites at central GABAergic synapses, assuming the simultaneous binding of several subunits per receptor complex. Does this imply that changes in the clustering of gephyrin are necessarily followed by alterations in receptor numbers aminophylline at inhibitory synapses? The parallel changes of gephyrin and GlyR clustering downstream of integrin signaling suggest that this may be so (Charrier et al., 2010). Along the same line, our data show that GlyR and GABAAR levels increase with the number of clustered gephyrin molecules at spinal cord synapses. Regulatory processes at GABAergic synapses may also affect GABAARs and gephyrin levels alike (Bannai et al., 2009 and Papadopoulos and Soykan, 2011); however, the sequence of these events is less clear, since there exists a reciprocal stabilization between GABAARs and gephyrin (discussed in Fritschy et al., 2008).