Quantitative synaptic vesicle imaging for evaluating neuron activities in neurodegenerative diseases

Synaptic vesicle dynamics play an important role in studying neuronal and synaptic activities of neurodegenerative diseases ranging from epidemic Alzheimer's disease to rare Rett syndrome. To obtain significant statistical power in such studies, we developed a high content analysis (HCA) pipeline to visualize the vesicle dynamics and characterize the neuronal synaptic activities in a large population of neurons. Our experiments on hippocampal neuron assays showed that the proposed HCA system can automatically detect vesicles and quantify their dynamics for evaluating neuron activities. The availability of such an automated system would open up a vista to investigate synaptic neuropathology and identify candidate therapeutics of neurodegeneration.