Quick-Freezing to Catch the Membrane Changes that Occur During Exocytosis
The technique that we have used to capture synaptic vesicle exocytosis at the frog neuromuscular junction - that of quick-freezing muscles followed by freeze fracture (3) or freeze substitution (6) - works sufficiently well now that it may be useful in other sorts of membrane studies, or studies of fast structural changes with the electron microscope. This note reviews the quickfreezing technique we use, and describes its application to the problem of synaptic vesicle exocytosis and recycling at the synapse.Here, many of the membrane changes of interest occur during the brief delay in synaptic transmission, on a time scale of milliseconds or fractions of milliseconds, and leave only traces thereafter. In the past, we have studied these left-over traces in tissues fixed with the standard chemicals for electron microscopy (1), and have inferred from them that vesicles discharge the quanta of neurotransmitters, as the physiologists would predict.