PrP^C Controls via Protein Kinase A the Direction of Synaptic Plasticity in the Immature Hippocampus

Dr. Premzl has questioned the lack of citation of his work in our paper (Caiati et al., 2013). We are very familiar with his work and his contribution in the field of bioinformatics of prion proteins. Indeed, one of us has recently published a work (Poggiolini and Legname, 2012) where his contribution was rightly acknowledged. We believe however, that in the context of the present work his references are not relevant. We have indeed focused on the role of the PrPC protein in regulating the expression of postsynaptic cyclic AMP dependent protein kinase A at immature mossy fiber-CA3 synapses. This signaling molecule accounts for LTP in young but not in adult animals. We did not identify the signaling cascades downstream of PKA activation. MAPK (shown to be upregulated by PrPC in Premzl et al., 2005) is not required to trigger LTP in neonatal hippocampus (Yasuda et al., 2003). We felt that many papers were left out in the bibliography of our work and that we struggled to include only the most relevant and pertinent ones.

Citations

Caiati MD, Safiulina VF, Fattorini G, Sivakumaran S, Legname G, Cherubini E (2013) PrPC controls via protein kinase A the direction of synaptic plasticity in the immature hippocampus. J Neurosci 33:2973-2983.

Poggiolini I, Legname G (2012) Mapping the prion protein distribution in marsupials: insights from comparing opossum with mouse CNS. PLoS One 7(11):e50370. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0050370. Epub 2012 Nov 29

Premzl M, Delbridge M, Gready JE, Wilson P, Johnson M, Davis J, Kuczek E, Marshall Graves JA (2005) The prion protein gene: identifying regulatory signals using marsupial sequence. Gene 349:121-134.

Yasuda H, Barth AL, Stellwagen D, Malenka RC (2003) A developmental switch in the signaling cascades for LTP induction. Nat Neurosci 6:15-16.

Conflict of Interest:

I have no competing interests