Oligomeric interaction between ryanodine receptors: potential role in Ca(2+) release.

Receptor proteins in both eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells often form regular lattice or array in the membrane. Recent theoretical analyses indicate that such arrays may provide a novel mechanism for receptor signaling regulation in cells. The functional coupling between neighboring receptors could improve the signaling performance. The ryanodine receptors (RyR)/calcium release channels usually form 2-D regular lattice in the endoplasmic/sarcoplasmic reticulum membranes. Thus, RyR is a potentially good model to study the function of receptor 2-D array. In this article, we briefly review recent progresses in this research field, including RyR-RyR interaction, RyR array's function and working mechanisms. The investigations performed by new methods in our laboratory are summarized. We demonstrate that the RyR-RyR interaction is modulated by the functional states of RyRs. Accordingly, the mechanism of "dynamic coupling" of RyR array is proposed. Its possible role in RyR-mediated Ca(2+) release is discussed.