During their navigation, axons integrate multiple environmental cues that guide them towards their target. These cues activate guidance receptors at the surface of axon terminals, the growth cones, which in turn initiate an appropriate signaling pathway. Thus, the temporal and spatial regulation of the cell surface distribution of the receptors is critical to set the sensitivity of the growth cone1. In this context, midline crossing by commissural axons is an excellent model to investigate the regulation of receptor cell surface levels. In the developing spinal cord, commissural axons are initially attracted towards the ventral floor plate where they cross the midline. After crossing, they lose their responsiveness to the floor plate attractants and gain response to floor plate repellents so that they can exit the floor plate and navigate towards their final destination in the contralateral side of the nervous system2,3. Regulation of receptor availability at the growth cone surface is one of the mechanisms underlying the switch of responsiveness to midline cues4,5. Thus, selective monitoring of the receptors present at the plasma membrane of growth cones is of prime importance. We describe here a method based on the pH-dependent fluorescence property of a green fluorescent protein (GFP) variant to specifically visualize the axon guidance receptors that are addressed to the plasma membrane in vitro and in vivo, in the developing chick spinal cord.
Rothman and colleagues engineered by point mutations pH-sensitive variants of GFP including the ecliptic pHluorin6. Ecliptic pHluorin has the property of being nonfluorescent when exposed to acidic pH (<6), while being fluorescent at neutral pH. This allows distinguishing nonfluorescent receptors localized in intracellular acidic compartments (i.e. endosomes, trafficking vesicles) from fluorescent receptors incorporated to the plasma membrane and thus exposed to the extracellular neutral pH7. We took advantage of this to monitor the plasma membrane localization of plexinA1, an axon guidance receptor mediating the growth cone response to the midline repellent semaphorin 3B5 (Figure 1A). We describe here the in vitro characterization of a pHluorin-plexinA1 construct, along with in ovo electroporation8-10 of this construct in the developing chick spinal cord followed by the microscopic analysis of cryosections which enable to follow the axon guidance receptor dynamics in vivo with both spatial and temporal resolutions.