Zebrafish fast muscle contractions avoid the mammalian requirement for voltage-gated Na+ channels.

Fast skeletal muscle fibers from zebrafish share a number of functional properties with mammalian twitch muscle fibers, making this vertebrate a precious model to investigate the pathophysiology of neuromuscular disorders. We previously reported that action potentials (APs) from zebrafish fast fibers exhibit low amplitude and require unusually strong negative resting membrane voltage levels to be elicited. In this study, using voltage-clamp and current-clamp techniques, we explored the properties of voltage-gated Na+ channels (NaV) responsible for initiation and propagation of AP in isolated adult zebrafish fast skeletal muscle fibers and compared them to mouse fast-twitch muscle fibers using the same experimental conditions. We found that kinetics of activation and inactivation of NaV were faster in zebrafish fibers and, overall, that the voltage-dependence of inactivation was shifted by 25 mV toward negative voltages as compared to mouse fibers, yielding a mean half-inactivation potential of -90 mV. In agreement with these findings, recording of APs at various resting membrane potentials indicated that APs vanished for resting membrane potentials less negative than -80 mV in zebrafish, whereas APs could still be elicited from resting membrane potentials as low as -60 mV in mice. In addition, Ca2+ transients induced by field stimulation were insensitive to Na+ current blockade in zebrafish but not in mouse fibers. Fluorescence labeling of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors showed that zebrafish fast fibers were multi-innervated with a mean distance between extra-synaptic sarcolemma and motor endplates of 14 µm, expected to lead to negligible attenuation of depolarization propagated from endplates. Finally, knock out of the two genes encoding pore-forming NaV subunits in zebrafish muscles did not induce any change in locomotion and escape behavior of the animals. Taken together, these data question the role of NaV and the occurrence of APs in zebrafish fast muscle.