Remodeling of the neuromuscular junction in mice with deleted exons 5 and 6 of acetylcholinesterase.

At the vertebrate skeletal neuromuscular junction (NMJ), two closely related enzymes can hydrolyze acetylcholine (ACh): acetylcholinesterase (AChE) and butyrylcholinesterase (BChE). Advances in mouse genomics offer new approaches to assess the role of specific cholinesterases involved in neuromuscular transmission (Minic et al., 2003). AChE knockout mice provide a valuable tool for examining the effects of long-term complete and selective abolition of AChE activity (Xie et al., 2000). AChE and BChE genes encode two functional domains--the catalytic domain (exons 2, 3, and 4 of AChE, or exon 2 of BChE) and a C-terminal domain (exon 5 or 6 of AChE, or exon 3 of BChE)--that dictate the targeting of the enzymes (Massoulié, 2002). In mammals, the AChE gene produces three types of coding regions by deleting 5'- splice acceptor sites, which generate proteins; these proteins possess the same catalytic domain associated with distinct C-terminal peptides. AChE subunits of type R (readthrough) produce soluble monomers; they are expressed during development and are thought to be induced in the mouse brain by stress (Kaufer et al., 1998). AChE subunits of type H (hydrophobic) produce GPI-anchored dimers, mainly in blood cells. Subunits of type T (tailed) exist for both AChE and BChE. They represent the predominant AChE variant expressed in cholinergically innervated tissues (muscle and nerve). These subunits generate a variety of quaternary structures, including homomeric oligomers (monomers, dimers, tetramers), as well as hetero-oligomeric assemblies with anchoring proteins ColQ (Krejci et al., 1997) and PRiMA (Perrier et al., 2002). At the NMJ, AChE is clustered by the interaction of the coding sequence of exon 6 with ColQ (Feng et al., 1999). The deletion of exons 5 and 6 in the AChE gene transforms anchored AChE into a soluble enzyme (Camp et al., 2004). The present study was designed to evaluate neuromuscular transmission and nicotinic ACh receptor (nAChR) distribution in muscles from mutant mice with deletions of these two spliced exons (AChE-del-exons-5+6-/-).