11.29.09
‘Temple of the mind’ unlocked
‘Temple of the mind’ unlocked
Map of fundamental brain receptor opens doors to treatments.
The full structure of a fiendishly complicated and important brain protein has been determined by researchers, potentially enabling the development of new treatments for a wealth of neurological disorders.
Eric Gouaux and his colleagues undertook the difficult task of mapping the structure of a glutamate receptor, a protein that mediates signalling between neurons in the brain and elsewhere in the nervous system. The receptor is also thought to be crucial to processes such as memory and learning.
The resulting picture “tells us things about the organization of the receptor that were just completely unanticipated” says Gouaux, a protein crystallographer at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. The work appears online today in Nature1.