Imaging of Intracellular and Plasma Membrane Pools of PI(4,5)P(2) and PI4P in Human Platelets

Phosphoinositides (PIs) are phosphorylated membrane lipids that have a plethora of roles in the cell, including vesicle trafficking, signaling, and actin reorganization. The most abundant PIs in the cell are phosphatidylinositol-4,5-bisphosphate [PI(4,5)P(2)] and phosphatidylinositol-4-monophosphate (PI4P). The localization and roles of both PI(4,5)P(2) and PI4P are well established, is the broadly accepted methodological approach for their immunocytochemical visualization in different cell compartments in several cell lines. However, not much is known about these PIs in platelets (PLTs), the smallest blood cells that detect vessel wall injury, activate, and stop the bleeding. Therefore, we sought to investigate the localization of PI(4,5)P(2) and PI4P in resting and activated PLTs by antibody staining. Here, we show that the intracellular pools of PI(4,5)P(2) and PI4P can be detected by the established staining protocol, and these pools can be modulated by inhibitors of OCRL phosphatase and PI4KIIIα kinase. However, although resting PLTs readily stain for the plasma membrane (PM) pools of PI(4,5)P(2) and PI4P, just a few activated cells were stained with the established protocol. We show that optimized protocol allows for the visualization of PI(4,5)P(2) and PI4P at PM in activated PLTs, which could also be modulated by OCRL and PI4KIIIα inhibitors. We conclude that PI(4,5)P(2) and PI4P are more sensitive to lipid extraction by permeabilizing agents in activated than in resting human PLTs, which suggests their different roles during PLT activation.