| Annotated protein: | Catenin alpha-2 (Alpha N-catenin). Gene symbol: CTNNA2. Taxonomy: Mus musculus (Mouse). Uniprot ID: Q61301 |
| antibody wiki: | |
| SynGO gene info: | SynGO data @ CTNNA2 |
| Ontology domain: | Biological Process |
| SynGO term: | modification of postsynaptic actin cytoskeleton (GO:0098885) |
| Synapse type(s): | hippocampus |
| Annotated paper: | Abe K, et al. "Stability of dendritic spines and synaptic contacts is controlled by alpha N-catenin" Nat Neurosci. 2004 Apr;7(4):357-63 PMID:15034585 |
| Figure(s): | Figure 2, 4, 5 |
| Annotation description: | AlphaN-catenin is an actin interactor. The paper examines the effect of alphaN-catenin deletion on the postsynaptic dynamics of the actin cytoskeleton in spines. Figure 2 examines the rate of spin mobility, as estimated using time-lapse imaging in cultured mouse neurons transfected with an EGFP-tagged actin. In the alphaN-catenin knockout, the change in spine length is higher (indicating higher mobility), and in the alphaN-catenin over-expressing neurons the rate is lower (Quantified in Figure 2e,f). Figure 4: monitoring of spines using time-lapse imaging in cultured mouse neurons transfected with an EGFP-tagged actin. Identical dendrites were analyzed over a period of 10 days. The rate of unchanged spines was highest in alphaN-catenin overexpressing neurons and lowest in the KO neurons. Conversely, the rate of disappearing spines was highest in KO neurons and lowest in the over-expressing neurons. Figure 5 shows that only the deletion of the actin-binding domain of alphaN-catenin (Fig. 5a, 1-870) leads to an increase in the number of spines (Fig. 5c) as seen for the over expression of the WT construct, indicating that the actin-binding site is mediating the effect of alphaN-catenin on the stability of spines. Taken together, these data suggest that the lack of-, or the over expression of alphaN-caenin affects the spin stability through its interaction with the actin cytoskeleton. |
| Evidence tracking, Biological System: | Cultured neurons |
| Evidence tracking, Protein Targeting: | Genetic transformation (eg; knockout, knockin, mutations) Over-expression |
| Evidence tracking, Experiment Assay: | Confocal |
| Annotator(s): | Noa Lipstein (ORCID:0000-0002-0755-5899) Cordelia Imig (ORCID:0000-0001-7351-8706) Vincent O'connor (ORCID:0000-0003-3185-5709) Nils Brose (ORCID:0000-0003-0938-8534) |
| Lab: | Department of Molecular Neurobiology, Max Planck Institute of Experimental Medicine, 37075 Göttingen, Germany |
| SynGO annotation ID: | 996 |
| Dataset release (version): | 20231201 |
| View annotation as GO-CAM model: |  |