Research Paper Volume 13, Issue 8 pp 11678—11695
Piccolo is essential for the maintenance of mouse retina but not cochlear hair cell function
- 1 School of Life Science and Key Laboratory of the Ministry of Education for Experimental Teratology, Shandong University, Jinan 250100, China
- 2 First People's Hospital of Jinan, Jinan 250011, China
- 3 The Waksman Institute of Microbiology, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ 08854, USA
- 4 College of Life Sciences, Shandong Normal University, Jinan 250014, China
- 5 MOE Key Laboratory for Developmental Genes and Human Disease, Jiangsu Province High-Tech Key Laboratory for Bio-Medical Research, Institute of Life Sciences, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China
Received: October 30, 2020 Accepted: February 16, 2021 Published: April 21, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.202861How to Cite
Copyright: © 2021 Li et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Piccolo is a presynaptic protein with high conservation among different species, and the expression of Piccolo is extensive in vertebrates. Recently, a small fragment of Piccolo (Piccolino), arising due to the incomplete splicing of intron 5/6, was found to be present in the synapses of retinas and cochleae. However, the comprehensive function of Piccolo in the retina and cochlea remains unclear. In this study, we generated Piccolo knockout mice using CRISPR-Cas9 technology to explore the function of Piccolo. Unexpectedly, whereas no abnormalities were found in the cochlear hair cells of the mutant mice, significant differences were found in the retinas, in which two layers (the outer nuclear layer and the outer plexiform layer) were absent. Additionally, the amplitudes of electroretinograms were significantly reduced and pigmentation was observed in the fundoscopy of the mutant mouse retinas. The expression levels of Bassoon, a homolog of Piccolo, as well as synapse-associated proteins CtBP1, CtBP2, Kif3A, and Rim1 were down-regulated. The numbers of ribbon synapses in the retinas of the mutant mice were also reduced. Altogether, the phenotype of Piccolo-/- mice resembled the symptoms of retinitis pigmentosa (RP) in humans, suggesting Piccolo might be a candidate gene of RP and indicates Piccolo knockout mice are a good model for elucidating the molecular mechanisms of RP.