Highly purified splenic nerve vesicles: early post-mortem effects on norepinephrine content and pools.

Abstract

Isolated large dense-core vesicles from bovine splenic nerve can be prepared at a purity comparable to that of adrenomedullary vesicles. Improved methods coupled with a short post-mortem delay of ∼10 min, from the moment of sacrifice at the slaughterhouse to chilling the nerves, yield vesicles containing 11–12 μg norepinephrine (NE)/mg protein (range 5–18) at 80–90% purity. In the upper range, therefore, the vesicles contain 100 nmol NE/mg protein uncorrected for purity, which is more than an order of magnitude higher than published values for splenic nerves from other laboratories. The extrapolated estimate for contentin vivo is 200 nmol/mg protein.