Glutamate receptors play major roles in excitatory transmission in the vertebrate brain.
Among ionotropic glutamate receptors (AMPA, kainate, NMDA), AMPA receptors mediate fast …

In recent years, sensory neuroscientists have made major efforts to dissect the structure and
function of ribbon synapses which process sensory information in the eye and ear. This …

The quantal hypothesis states that neurotransmitter is released in discrete packages, quanta,
thought to represent the neurotransmitter content of individual vesicles. If true, then vesicle …

Adaptor protein 3 (AP-3) is a vesicle-coat protein that forms a heterotetrameric complex.
Two types of AP-3 subunits are found in mammalian cells. Ubiquitous AP-3 subunits are …

Night blindness can result from impaired photoreceptor function and a subset of cases have
been linked to dysfunction of Cav1.4 calcium channels and in turn compromised synaptic …

Cells assemble macromolecular complexes into scaffoldings that serve as substrates for
catalytic processes. Years of molecular neurobiology research indicate that neurotransmission …

Neurons enhance their computational power by combining linear and nonlinear transformations
in extended dendritic trees. Rich, spatially distributed processing is rarely associated …

Ribbon synapses mediate continuous release in neurons that have graded voltage responses.
While mammalian retinas can signal visual flicker at 80–100 Hz, the time constant, τ, for …

Understanding the fundamental role of soluble NSF attachment protein receptor (SNARE)
complexes in membrane fusion requires knowledge of the spatiotemporal dynamics of their …

The neurotransmitter glutamate is used by most neurons in the brain to activate a multitude of
different types of glutamate receptors and transporters involved in fast and relatively slower …