Author(s)

Shuangqiong Tan^1,2, Chi Xu^1,2, Jiapei Dai^1,2*

¹Wuhan Institute for Neuroscience and Neuroengineering (WINN), South-Central University for Nationalities, Wuhan, China.
²Department of Neurobiology, College of Life Sciences, South-Central University for Nationalities, Wuhan, China.

Glutamate, the most abundant excitatory neurotransmitter in the nervous system, can induce biophotonic activity and transmission in mouse brain slices. As a signaling molecule, aspartate is not considered to be an independent neurotransmitter during the long evolution process, which may be just a co-transmitter or neuromodulator. In the view of structure and physiological similarities of aspartate and glutamate, as well as some differences between them, we attempted to investigate whether aspartate could also induce biophotonic activity in mouse brain slices and its effect characteristics. The ultraweak biophoton imaging system (UBIS) was used to carry out a real-time observation of biophoton activity induced by aspartate in mouse brain slices. It was found that the biophotonic emissions induced by aspartate at different concentrations (12.5 mM, 25 mM and 50 mM) presented concentration-dependent effects and 50 mM aspartate could obviously induce biophoton activities with the characteristic changes of initiation, maintenance, washing and reapplication, which were also different from that induced by 50 mM glutamate as reported before. Considering the species differences in excitatory neurotransmitters, these findings indicate that aspartate-induced biophotonic activity may imply the evolutionary differences in the animal brains.

Biophoton, Biophoton Imaging, Aspartate, Glutamate, Brain Slice

Tan, S. , Xu, C. and Dai, J. (2019) The Characteristics of Biophotonic Activity Induced by Aspartate May Be Related to the Evolution of Species. Natural Science, 11, 197-203. doi: 10.4236/ns.2019.116020.