Residence Times of Receptors in Dendritic Spines Analyzed by Stochastic Simulations in Empirical Domains

Analysis of high-density superresolution imaging of receptors reveals the organization of dendrites at nanoscale resolution. We present here an apparently novel method that uses local statistics extracted from short-range trajectories for the simulations of long-range trajectories in empirical live cell images. Based on these empirical simulations, we compute the residence time of a receptor in dendritic spines that accounts for receptors’ local interactions and geometrical membrane organization. We report here that depending on the type of the spine, the residence time varies from 1 to 5 min. Moreover, we show that there exists transient organized structures, previously described as potential wells that can regulate the trafficking of receptors to dendritic spine: the simulation results suggest that receptor trafficking is regulated by transient structures.