Decoupling astrocytes in adult mice impairs synaptic plasticity and spatial learning

To study the role of the gap junction coupled astrocytic network, we generated inducible double knockouts to selectively delete Cx30 and Cx43 from astrocytes in adult mice. Mice carrying loxP-flanked Gjb6 (Cx30fl/fl mice) (Boulay et al., 2013) and Gja1 (Cx43fl/fl mice) (Theis et al., 2003) alleles were crossbred with mice expressing the tamoxifen-sensitive Cre-recombinase CreERT2 under the endogenous GLAST(Slc1a3)-promoter (Mori et al., 2006). Adult, 8-10 week old mice (Cx30fl/fl:Cx43fl/fl:GLASTCreERT2/+, termed cKO) and littermate control mice (Cx30fl/fl:Cx43fl/fl:GLAST+/+) were injected with tamoxifen for 5 consecutive days and hippocampi were isolated for subsequent TMT-based proteomics analysis 90 days after tamoxifen treatment, to study the consequences of astrocyte decoupling and connexin deletion.