Study Of Aspartate-induced Biophoton Activity And Mechanism In Mice Brain Slices

Biophoton also known as ultra-weak photon emission or UPE, is very weak radiation photon bean, which is closely related to the physiological and pathological states of the organisms almost in all life, including microorganism, plants, animals and human beings. Recently, we have demonstrated that glutamate, the most abundant excitatory neurotransmitter in the central nervous system could induce biophotonic activity and transmission in mouse brain slices, but the exact mechanism is not clear, Aspartate is also a kind of excitatory amino acid, but its importance is controversial in nervous system. It has been known that aspartate can be of selective activation of N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor as a role of non-metabolism in the mammalian brain, therefore aspartate is not considered to be an independent neurotransmitter, may be just a cotransmitter or neuromodulator, In view of structural and physiological similarities of aspartate and glutamate, as well as some difference between them, we attempt to investigate whether aspartate can also induce biophotonic activity in mouse brain slices and the possible mechanism so that it can provide new evidence to further clarify the biological roles of biophoton in the brain.We employed a new biophoton imaging system to carry out a real-time observation of biophoton activity induced by aspartate in mouse brain slices. Consequently, it was found that:?1?50mM aspartate could led obvious biophotonic activity, which presented the characteristic changes of initiation, maintenance, washing and reapplication;?2?Removing extracellular Ca²⁺ or removing intracellular and extracellular Ca²⁺ together, or applying TTX or procaine could significantly reduce aspartate-induced biophotonic activities;?3?Sodium azide treatment could partially inhibit aspartate-induced biophoton activities. In addition, 0.6% acetic acid?pH4.0? could induce biophotonic activities, which are similar to the patterns of aspartate or glutamate-induced biophotonic activities.These results suggest that calcium ion(Ca²⁺), the neural electrical activity and proton?H+? may be involved in the process of aspartate-induced biophotonic activity. But given the special physiological role of aspartate in the nervous system, our finding could not figure out a complete theoretical model, which can provide an exact explanation for the mechanism of biophotonic activities induced by aspartate or glutamate. These need to be investigated further.