Andrzej Foik is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Irvine.

Feng Feng is a PhD candidate at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Material below summarizes the article Neuron-Specific Gene 2 (NSG2) Encodes an AMPA Receptor Interacting Protein That Modulates Excitatory Neurotransmission, published on January 4, 2019, in eNeuro and authored by Praveen Chander, Matthew J. Kennedy, Bettina Winckler, and Jason P. Weick. Normal brain function depends on the proper communication of information among billions of neurons. This communication occurs at specialized junctions called synapses, and each neuron contains approximately a thousand synapses, making the total number of synapses in the human brain on the order of 100 trillion. Adding to this complexity is the fact that each synapse contains a large number of proteins that function as receptors as well as scaffolding, signaling, and trafficking proteins. While this complexity is beginning to be unraveled, a major outstanding question in the field concerns how synapses are assembled during development, when synapses serving all of these functions form within a short time period. Specifically, we were interested in unraveling how nascent synapses (which contain relatively few proteins) recruit the synaptic protein complement during development. To address this question, we used neural differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs), which allowed us to observe some of the earliest events during synapse formation. hPSC-derived neurons (hPSNs) establish synapses over a protracted time-course, which permits researchers to ask detailed questions about the timing of specific events.

Michael Levine is a professor in UCLA's Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences Department.