Biophysical Journal 72: 507-521 (1997)
© 1997 the Biophysical Society

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A Mechanism for Discharge of Charged Excitatory Neurotransmitter

Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel
Department of Neurobiology and Otto Loewi Center for Cellular and Molecular Neurobiology, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem 91904, Israel

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 (ion interchange). It is shown theoretically that ion interchange obviates the necessity for a separate energy source and can provide the observed rapid vesicle discharge.

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