Academic Dissertation To be presented for public criticism, with the permission of the Faculty of Science of the (1998) Disulfide bonding and cysteine accessibility in the α-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methylisoxazole-4-propionic acid receptor subunit GluRD. Implications for redox modulation of glutamate receptors. receptors and bacterial periplasmic amino acid-binding proteins share the ionic mechanism ...

In Retzius neurones of the medicinal leech, Hirudo medicinalis, kainate activates ionotropic glutamate receptors classified as AMPA/kainate receptors. Activation of the AMPA/kainate receptor-coupled cation channels evokes a marked depolarization, intracellular acidification, and increases in the intracellular concentrations of Na+ ([Na+]i) and Ca2+. Qualitatively similar changes are observed up...

ATP can be released from neurons and act as a neuromodulator in the nervous system. Besides neurons, cortical astrocytes also are capable of releasing ATP from acidic vesicles in a Ca(2+)-dependent way. In the present work, we investigated the release of ATP from Müller glia cells of the chick embryo retina by examining quinacrine staining and by measuring the extracellular levels of ATP in pur...

Llano DA, Theyel BB, Mallik AK, Sherman SM, Issa NP. Rapid and sensitive mapping of long-range connections in vitro using flavoprotein autofluorescence imaging combined with laser photostimulation. J Neurophysiol 101: 3325–3340, 2009. First published March 25, 2009; doi:10.1152/jn.91291.2008. We investigated the use of flavoprotein autofluorescence (FA) as a tool to map long-range neural connec...

We investigated internal Ca(2+) release at mossy fiber synapses on CA3 pyramidal neurons (mossy fiber terminals, MFTs) in the hippocampus. Presynaptic Ca(2+) influx was induced by giving a brief train of 20 stimuli at 100 Hz to the mossy fiber pathway. Using Ca(2+) imaging techniques, we recorded the Ca(2+) response as DeltaF/F, which increased rapidly with stimulation, but was often accompanie...

The medial shell of nucleus accumbens (NAc) and its mesolimbic dopamine inputs mediate forms of fearful as well as of incentive motivation. For example, either appetitive and/or actively fearful behaviors are generated in a keyboard pattern by localized glutamate disruptions in NAc (via microinjection of the AMPA receptor antagonist DNQX) at different anatomical locations along a rostrocaudal g...

Two-photon laser scanning microscopy was used to correlate electrical events detected with whole-cell somatic recordings to Ca2+ transients in dendrites of olfactory bulb granule cells. A subset of spontaneous subthreshold depolarizing events recorded at the soma were shown to correspond to suprathreshold dendritic, Na-dependent action potentials [APs; dendritic spikes (D-spikes)]. These potent...

In newborn pigs, vasodilation of pial arterioles in response to glutamate is mediated via carbon monoxide (CO), a gaseous messenger endogenously produced from heme degradation by a heme oxygenase (HO)-catalyzed reaction. We addressed the hypothesis that ionotropic glutamate receptors (iGluRs), including N-methyl-D-aspartic acid (NMDA)- and 2-amino-3-(5-methyl-3-oxo-1,2-oxazol-4-yl) propanoic ac...

The neurotransmitter serotonin (5-HT) is involved in mood disorder aetiology and it has been reported that (organophosphate) OP exposure affects 5-HT turnover. The aim of this study was to elucidate the mechanism underlying OP effects on the adult 5-HT system. First, acute in vivo administration of the OP diazinon (0, 1.3, 13 or 39 mg/kg i.p.) to male Hooded Lister rats inhibited the activity o...

Glutamate receptors specifically activated by alpha-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methylisoxazole-4-propionic acid (AMPA) have been reported to interact with the highly sulfated glycosaminoglycan, heparin, and to subsequently express lower binding affinity for [3H]AMPA. The present study examined whether heparin also modifies the kinetic properties of single channel activity expressed by isolated AMPA rece...