Myelination and remyelination in the central nervous systems critically depend on the ability of oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs) to migrate. Local volume increases have been observed to occur during migration in OPCs, which additionally show local increases in cytosolic calcium at the same position as the observed volume increases. Channels of the transient receptor potential family (TRP) are supposed to play a key role during cellular migration and could thus be candidates to link volume changes to Ca²⁺ transients. To find out, whether this channel type could be involved in OPC migration here we analysed the expression of different TRP channels in OPCs at the mRNA level.

In the embryonic rat brain, TRPC1 has been shown to form heteromultimers with TRPC3 and TRPC6 (Strübing & Krapivinsky et al., 2008) Furthermore, the TRPC channels 1-6 have been shown to be expressed in oligodendrocytes (Paez et al., 2011)

Additionally, we investigated the expression level of TRPM 3, 7 and 8 as well as TRPV1 to determine, whether they could potentially be involved in OPC migration as well.

While for most channels we found that they are expressed at the same level or upregulated in mature Oligodendrocytes, we observed a downregulation of TRPC3 and TRPC 6, while simultaneously TRPC 1 was upregulated in the course of morphological maturation of the OPCs to ramified oligodendrocytes. Due to the downregulation of TRPC3 and 6, a heteromultimer of TRPC1, 3 and 6 is less likely to be formed in later stages of development.Since TRPC3 and 6 were most predominantly expressed in OPCs during the time of their maximal migration capacity and downregulated at the time of migration arrests our results are compatible with the hypothesis,that an interplay of TRPC1, 3 and 6 is potentially involved in OPC migration.