Transitional elements with characteristics of both growth cones and presynaptic terminals observed in cell cultures of cerebellar neurons

Summary As growth cones interact with targets, they become presynaptic terminals by losing growth cone characteristics and acquiring presynaptic characteristics. Results presented here show that transitional elements can be identified in cell cultures of rat cerebellum, which have some characteristics of both growth cones and presynaptic terminals. During the first week in culture, slender growth cones have fine filopodia. Subsequently, many growth cones in contact with the polylysine substrate spontaneously enlarge and become non-motile. In transitional elements, the synaptic vesicle protein p65 extends into the peripheral domain and in some cases, extends into filopodia. Many of these transitional elements have active filopodia but show no movement over the substrate for periods of up to nine days. These transitional elements have lost the actin-rich peripheral domain of the growth cone but retain actin labelling in the filopodia. With electron microscopy, transitional elements were seen to contain accumulations of synaptic vesicles at the site of contact with the substrate. Electron microscopic immunocytochemistry showed these synaptic vesicles labelled for p65 with silver-developed gold particles. Thus, transitional elements have characteristics of both growth cones and presynaptic terminals, suggesting that they may also have functional attributes of both growth cones and presynaptic elements.