Molecular Characterization of an SV Capture Site in the Mid-Region of the Presynaptic CaV2.1 Calcium Channel C-Terminal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Neurotransmitter is released from presynaptic nerve terminals at fast-transmitting synapses by the action potential-gating of voltage dependent calcium channels (CaV), primarily of the CaV2.1 and CaV2.2 types. Entering Ca2+ diffuses to a nearby calcium sensor associated with a docked synaptic vesicle (SV) and initiates its fusion and discharge. Our previous findings that single CaVs can gate SV fusion argued for one or more tethers linking CaVs to docked SVs, but the molecular nature of these tether have not been established. We recently developed a cell-free, in vitro biochemical assay, termed SV pull-down (SV-PD), to test for SV binding proteins and used this to demonstrate that CaV2.2 or the distal third of its C-terminal can capture SVs. In subsequent reports we identified the binding site and characterized an SV binding motif. In this study, we set out to test if a similar SV-binding mechanism exists in the primary presynaptic channel type, CaV2.1. We cloned the chick variant of this channel and to our surprise found that it lacked the terminal third of the C-terminal, ruling out direct correlation with CaV2.2. We used SV-PD to identify an SV binding site in the distal half of the CaV2.1 C-terminal, a region that corresponds to the central third of the CaV2.2 C-terminal. Mutant fusion proteins combined with motif-blocking peptide strategies identified two domains that could account for SV binding; one in an alternatively spliced region (E44) and a second more distal site. Our findings provide a molecular basis for CaV2.1 SV binding that can account for recent evidence of C-terminal-dependent transmitter release modulation and that may contribute to SV tethering within the CaV2.1 single channel Ca2+ domain.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".