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Histamine Compartments of the Drosophila Brain With an Estimate of the Quantum Content at the Photoreceptor Synapse

¹Life Sciences Centre and ²Neuroscience Institute, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

Submitted 27 August 2004; accepted in final form 30 October 2004

Reliable estimates of the quantum size in histaminergic neurons are not available. We have exploited two unusual opportunities in the fly's (Drosophila melanogaster) visual system to make such determinations for histaminergic photoreceptor synapses: 1) the possibility to microdissect successively from whole fly heads freeze-dried in acetone: the compound eyes; the first optic neuropils, or lamina; and the rest of the brain; and 2) the uniform sheaves of lamina synaptic terminals of photoreceptors R1–R6. We used this organization to count scrupulously the numbers of 30-nm synaptic vesicles from electron micrographs of R1–R6 profiles, and from microdissections we determined the regional contents of histamine in the compound eye, lamina, and central brain. Total head histamine averages 1.98 ng of which 9% was lost after freeze-drying in acetone and a further 28% after the brain was microdissected. Of the remainder, 71% was in the eye and lamina. Assuming that histamine loss from the tissue occurred mostly by diffusion evenly distributed among all regions, the overall lamina content of the head would be 0.1935 ng before dissection. From published values for the volumes of the brain's compartments, the computed regional concentrations of histamine are highest in the lamina (4.35 mM) because of the terminals of R1–R6. The concentration in the retina is 13% that in the lamina, suggesting that most histamine is vesicular. There are 43,500 ± 7,400 (SD) synaptic vesicles per terminal and, if all histamine is allocated equally and exclusively among these, the vesicle contents would be 858 ± 304 x 10^–21 moles or 5,000 ± 1,800 (SD) molecules at an approximate concentration of 670 mM. These values are compared with the vesicle contents at synapses using acetylcholine and catecholamines.

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