nicotinic acetylcholine receptor

Cryo-EM Structure of the Nicotine Receptor May Lead to New Therapies for Addiction by Neuroscience News

A detailed 3D structure of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors could help pave the way to developing new treatments for nicotine addiction, researchers report.

Three-dimensional structures of nicotinic acetylcholine receptor determined by cryo-EM, courtesy of Hibbs Lab. NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to Hibbs Lab, UT Southwestern Medical Center.

“Being a lead author on an accepted manuscript is in and of itself an extremely gratifying experience; being the lead author on a study accepted by Nature still feels surreal,” he added.

The Hibbs laboratory was previously able to obtain a structure of one of the two complexes using X-ray crystallography, a first at that time due to the difficulty of crystallizing membrane proteins.

“For membrane proteins in particular, obtaining crystals that will diffract to high resolution is challenging, which makes cryo-EM particularly powerful. We were previously able to obtain one of these nicotinic receptor subunit arrangements by X-ray crystallography. Cryo-EM gave us both arrangements, from a single sample, at higher resolution,” Dr. Hibbs said./.../