Synaptic plasticity is the ability of the connections between nerve cells, called synapses, to change in strength. The presence of the AMPA-type glutamate receptors at the synapse controls the strength of excitatory transmission and their number can be modulated. There is however a need in technologies to visualize these events. In this study, a recently established protein- labeling technique was applied to label individually AMPA receptor subunits at the surface of neurons. Moreover, these subunits are integrated into heteromeric receptors and targeted to functional synapses. The diffusion of receptors at the surface of living neurons was dependent on the subunit composition. High-resolution images, sub-difraction limited, of hippocampal neurons stained for GluR2 were acquired with an experimental scanning near-field optical microscopy (SNOM) with the aim to image single molecules. This study should help to shed some light on the molecular aspects of the synaptic plasticity and could be particularly interesting to neuroscientists and physicists interesting in life sciences applications.

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