[Verse 1]
Down the axon a spike comes sprinting,
Hits the terminal, bulb is glinting,
Voltage gates for calcium creak and swing,
Charged ions rush in like a tide let loose,
The bouton was quiet, now it's humming,
Electric knock says the vesicle's coming.
[Chorus]
Calcium knocks, the SNAREs unlock,
Vesicle pops like a tiny clock,
One quantum drop sails cleft to shore,
Chemical whisper through a synapse door,
Spike to spark, dark to bright,
Katz's quanta, packed just right.
[Verse 2]
Synaptotagmin's the calcium sensor,
Feels the rush and plays conductor,
Synaptobrevin on the sac's own skin,
Reaches for syntaxin waiting within,
SNAP-25 zips the seam up tight,
Three proteins braid and the membranes unite,
But botulinum creeps in with its shears,
Slices the SNAREs and the message disappears.
[Chorus]
Calcium knocks, the SNAREs unlock,
Vesicle pops like a tiny clock,
One quantum drop sails cleft to shore,
Chemical whisper through a synapse door,
Spike to spark, dark to bright,
Katz's quanta, packed just right.
[Verse 3]
Bernard Katz listened close at the junction,
Heard transmitter release run by strange function,
Not a trickle but a packet, a quantal unit,
One vesicle's worth—he proved it and then he ran with it,
Nineteen twenty-one, Otto Loewi's dreaming,
Frog heart fluid sets a second heart beating,
He called it Vagusstoff, a ghostly German word,
Turned out to be acetylcholine, as we later heard.
[Verse 4]
Signal's loud but it can't linger,
Transporters reel it back like a fisherman's finger,
Serotonin's pulled by its own courier line,
SSRIs block that door, leave more behind,
Acetylcholinesterase chops the rest apart,
Diffusion drifts the leftovers far from the start,
Cleft goes quiet, membrane resets,
Ready again for the next spike it gets.
[Verse 5]
Across the cleft two kinds of ears are waiting,
Ionotropic gates, fast and uncreating,
Ligand fits the lock, the channel springs wide,
Sodium floods in on a millisecond tide,
Metabotropic's slower, a patient affair,
G-proteins wake and send signals somewhere,
Second messengers ripple through the cell's whole frame,
One quick shout, one slow-burning flame.
[Bridge]
Chemical talk costs a half-a-millisecond pause,
But paused for a purpose, obeying different laws,
It amplifies a whisper to a roar,
Flips a yes to a no at the postsynaptic door,
Plastic and changeable, strengthens what it's taught,
Fire together, wire together—that's the thought.
[Outro]
Exocytosis—the vesicle's release,
Spilling out its cargo, then it finds its peace,
From Loewi's frog to Katz's quantal dock,
Calcium knocks, and the SNAREs unlock.
[Chorus]
Calcium knocks, the SNAREs unlock,
Vesicle pops like a tiny clock,
One quantum drop sails cleft to shore,
Chemical whisper through a synapse door,
Spike to spark, dark to bright,
Katz's quanta, packed just right.