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Updated: Sep 5, 2025
Genetic Manipulation of Cerebellar Granule Neurons In Vitro and In Vivo to Study Neuronal Morphology and Migration
Published on: March 17, 2014
mGluR5 Is Substitutable for mGluR1 in Cerebellar Purkinje Cells for Motor Coordination, Developmental Synapse
Maria Harbers1, Harumi Nakao1, Takaki Watanabe2,3
1Laboratory of Animal Resources, Center for Disease Biology and Integrative Medicine, Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan.
Abstract:
Group I metabotropic glutamate receptors (mGluRs) include mGluR1 and mGluR5, which are coupled to the Gq family of heterotrimeric G-proteins and readily activated by their selective agonist 3,5-dihydroxyphenilglycine (DHPG). mGluR1 and mGluR5 exhibit nearly complementary distributions spatially or temporally in the central nervous system (CNS). In adult cerebellar Purkinje cells (PCs), mGluR1 is a dominant group I mGluR and mGluR5 is undetectable. mGluR1 expression increases substantially during the first three weeks of postnatal development and remains high throughout adulthood. On the other hand, mGluR5 expression is observed during the first two postnatal weeks and then decreases. However, functional differences between mGluR1 and mGluR5 in the CNS remains to be elucidated. To address this issue, we generated "mGluR5-rescue" mice in which mGluR5 is specifically expressed in PCs in global mGluR1-knockout (KO) mice. mGluR5-rescue mice exhibited apparently normal motor coordination, developmental elimination of redundant climbing fiber (CF)-PC synapses, and delay eyeblink conditioning, which were severely impaired in mGluR1-KO mice. We concluded that mGluR5 is functionally comparable with mGluR1 in cerebellar PCs.
