Physiological Properties of Excitatory Synaptic Transmission in the Central Nervous System (original) (raw)

1. S. Hestrin*,
2. D.J. Perkel*,
3. P. Sah†,
4. T. Manabe,
5. P. Renner†, and
6. R.A. Nicoll*,†
7. Departments of *Physiology and †Pharmacology, University of California, San Francisco, California 94143-0450

Excerpt

Excitatory synapses are the most common type of synapse in the brain. Although it had long been suspected that glutamate might be the transmitter at these synapses, it is only recently with the development of selective glutamate receptor antagonists that this issue has been clearly settled. Electophysiological analysis of excitatory synapses has been difficult for a number of reasons: (1) The reversal potential is far removed from the resting potential, (2) the synapses are located on dendrites at various electrotonic distances from the recording site, and (3) the synaptic potentials are often voltage-dependent. The introduction of whole-cell recording techniques to brain slices (Barnes and Werblin 1986; Blanton et al. 1989; Coleman and Miller 1989; Edwards et al. 1989) offers considerable advantages to the analysis of excitatory synaptic action. In this paper, we summarize some of our results obtained by applying this technique to excitatory synapses recorded in the hippocampus and...