A mechanism for discharge of charged excitatory neurotransmitter

Raya Khanin, Hanna Parnas*, Lee Segel

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

10 Scopus citations

Abstract

Excitatory neurotransmitter is charged, so that emptying of a transmitter-containing vesicle (discharge) would seem to require considerable energy. Even if the energy problem is surmounted and discharge thereby made possible, there is still a problem of making the discharge fast enough (considerably less than 1 ms). Proposed here is a mechanism wherein discharge of charged transmitter is accompanied by the influx of cocharged ions or coefflux of counter-charged particles (ior interchange). It is shown theoretically that ion interchange obviates the necessity for a separate energy source and car provide the observed rapid vesicle discharge.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)507-521
Number of pages15
JournalBiophysical Journal
Volume72
Issue number2 I
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 1997

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