Glutamate transporters regulate extracellular concentrations of glutamate, an excitatory neurotransmitter in the central nervous system. We have shown that the commonly used anesthetic isoflurane increased the activity of glutamate transporter type 3 (excitatory amino acid transporter 3, EAAT3) possibly via a protein kinase C (PKC)-dependent pathway. In this study, we showed that isoflurane ind...

NM A22834 (Albrecht) 2 Period (Per) genes are involved in the regulation of the circadian clock and are thought to modulate several brain functions. We show that Per2 Brdm1 mutant mice display alterations in the glutamatergic system. Lowered expression of the glutamate transporter Eaat1 is observed in these animals, leading to reduced uptake of glutamate by astrocytes. As a consequence, glutama...

Excitatory aminoacids (EAAs) are stored in glutamatergic neurons and related into synaptic cleft, where they can activate inotropic or metabotropic receptors. Their action ends due to transport mechanisms performed by EAAT transporters (EAAT1/GLAST, EAAT2/GLT1, EAAT3/EAAC1, and EAAT4 or EAAT5). Glutamate neurotoxicity has been described in several neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s ...

PURPOSE Our long-term goal is to compare how expression of glutamate receptor and non-vesicular transporter subunits differs between single neurons in the primate retina. Here we set out to ascertain general expression in the retina of Macaca fascicularis using a robust technique suitable for both levels of analysis. We constructed full-complement cDNAs from whole retina RNA using a protocol op...

Solute carrier (SLC) transporters are emerging drug targets. Identifying the molecular determinants responsible for their specific and selective transport activities describing key interactions with ligands crucial steps towards design of potential new drugs. A general functional mapping across more than 400 human SLC would pave way to rational systematic molecules modulating cellular transport...

Alcoholism is linked to disruption of the biological clock Alcohol and drug addiction are complex disorders with environmental, drug-induced and genetic components. It is likely that multiple genes contribute to the development of an addictive disease. There is a growing body of evidence implicating circadian clock genes in mechanisms of drug-abuse related behaviours. The clock genes, including...

We characterized the interaction of two conformationally constrained aspartate and glutamate analogs, 3-hydroxy-4,5,6,6atetrahydro-3aH-pyrrolo[3,4-d]isoxazole-4-carboxylic acid (HIP-A) and 3-hydroxy-4,5,6,6a-tetrahydro-3aH-pyrrolo[3,4-d]isoxazole6-carboxylic acid (HIP-B), with excitatory amino acid transporters (EAATs) in rat brain cortex synaptosomes. HIP-A and HIP-B were potent and noncompeti...

Copyright: © 2013 Mormile R, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a fatal neurodegenerative disease characterized by progressive muscular paralysis conne...

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