It is thus safe to predict that in the near future the elegant analysis of NA action accomplished by Kuo and Trussell in vitro will be integrated together with in vivo studies of NA action in intact animals. “
“The requirement for assembly of multiple subunits to form a functional oligomeric complex is a shared property among ligand-gated ion channels. Several different gene products for channel subunits exist within

virtually all ion channel families. This subunit multiplicity in theory allows the cell to tailor specific populations of receptors to match the needed physiological roles, a process that is typically considered dynamic. Receptors comprised of NSC 683864 datasheet different subunit combinations often have strikingly different subcellular localization or trafficking properties and may

activate and desensitize differently in response to agonist binding. The potential for cells to fine tune receptor properties through altering subunit combination is a prominent feature of the ionotropic glutamate receptors, which are the primary mediators of excitatory synaptic transmission (Traynelis et al., 2010). Following cloning of the 18 different glutamate receptor subunits almost two decades ago, it soon became apparent that certain combinations of subunits preferred to coassemble to form functional receptors in heterologous expression systems, and groups of subunits Selleckchem Fasudil that coassembled nicely matched known receptor subfamilies (AMPA-, kainate-, and NMDA-type). This led to the obvious hypothesis that mechanisms must exist to tightly control the specificity and stoichiometry of subunit assembly. The idea that subunit assembly is tightly regulated became more intriguing when it was discovered that some neurons express several different glutamate receptor subunits capable of forming multiple homomeric and heteromeric receptor subtypes, yet only distinct subunit combinations seemed to be functionally expressed (e.g., see Lu et al., 2009). These observations hinted that assembly is not

a simple stochastic process and that not all subunits PTPRJ are free to mix and match even within subfamilies of glutamate receptors. Recent work on a variety of fronts has cast a spotlight on the roles of the extracellular amino-terminal domains (ATDs) of the glutamate receptor subunits (Hansen et al., 2010). These regions form a semiautonomous domain of ∼400 amino acids in all glutamate receptor subunits (Figure 1), which has been hypothesized to play a critical role in subunit assembly (reviewed in Greger et al., 2007), in addition to controlling functional properties and recognizing a host of divergent ligands ranging from ions to organic molecules to proteins (see Hansen et al., 2010).