Colchicine is an alkaloid that is used clinically in the treatment of arthritic gout. This potent microtubule disrupting agent has also been used extensively as an experimental tool in studies characterizing the role of the cytoskeleton in a variety of cellular processes. Colchicine has also been used as a selective neurotoxin and in animal models of Alzheimer’s disease and epilepsy. Although t...

Inhibitory GABAA receptor modulators are widely used therapeutic agents for a variety of central nervous system disorders. Ltk cells stably expressing human recombinant GABAA subunits ( 1 1–3 2s) were seeded into 96-well plates, loaded with chlorocoumarin-2-dimyristoyl phosphatidylethanolamine and bis(1,3-diethyl-2-thiobarbiturate)trimethineoxonol, and rapid fluorescence resonance energy transf...

Colchicine is an alkaloid that is used clinically in the treatment of arthritic gout. This potent microtubule disrupting agent has also been used extensively as an experimental tool in studies characterizing the role of the cytoskeleton in a variety of cellular processes. Colchicine has also been used as a selective neurotoxin and in animal models of Alzheimer's disease and epilepsy. Although t...

The g-aminobutyric acid (GABA)A receptor is a hetero-oligomer consisting of five subunits, the combination of which confers unique pharmacological properties to the receptor. To understand the physiological role of native GABAA receptors, it is critical to determine their subunit compositions. The pharmacological characteristics of human a5b3g2 and a5b3g3 GABAA receptors stably expressed in L(t...

The gamma-aminobutyric acidA (GABAA) receptor purified from adult bovine cerebral cortex was photoaffinity-labelled with the agonist benzodiazepine [3H]flunitrazepam and the radioactivity shown to be coincident with a band with Mr 53,000 that was recognized by three anti-(GABAA receptor alpha 1 subunit sequence)-specific antibodies. Complete and limited CNBr cleavage of the purified photoaffini...

Autistic disorder is a complex genetic disease. Because of previous reports of individuals with autistic disorder with duplications of the Prader-Willi/Angelman syndrome critical region, we screened several markers across the 15q11-13 region, for linkage disequilibrium. One hundred forty families, consisting predominantly of a child with autistic disorder and both parents, were studied. Genotyp...

Two hypotheses have been put forward to explain the large accumulation of organic acids in fruits: (a) organic acids are not formed in the fruit, but are translocated from the leaves to the fruits which would act merely as storage organs (1, 2) ; and (b) the presence of the organic acids in fruits is due to the conversion of carbohydrates to organic acids in the fruit vesicles and not to transl...

Inhibitory glycine receptors (GlyRs) in the mammalian cortex probably contribute to brain development and to maintaining tonic inhibition. Given their presence throughout the cortex, their modulation likely has important physiological consequences. Although benzodiazepines potentiate gamma-aminobutyric acidA receptors (GABAARs), they may also modulate GlyRs because binding studies initially sug...