Physiological Reviews, Vol. 79, No. 3, July 1999, pp. 1019-1088
Copyright ©1999 by the American Physiological Society
Ion Channels in Presynaptic Nerve Terminals and Control of
Transmitter Release
Alon
Meir,
Simona
Ginsburg,
Alexander
Butkevich,
Sylvia G.
Kachalsky,
Igor
Kaiserman,
Ronit
Ahdut,
Serdar
Demirgoren, and
Rami
Rahamimoff
Department of Physiology and the Bernard Katz Minerva Centre for
Cell Biophysics, Hebrew University Hadassah Medical School,
Jerusalem, Israel
Meir, Alon,
Simona Ginsburg,
Alexander Butkevich,
Sylvia G. Kachalsky,
Igor Kaiserman,
Ronit Ahdut,
Serdar Demirgoren, and
Rami Rahamimoff.
Ion Channels in Presynaptic Nerve Terminals and Control of
Transmitter Release. Physiol. Rev. 79: 1019-1088, 1999.
The primary function of the presynaptic nerve
terminal is to release transmitter quanta and thus activate the
postsynaptic target cell. In almost every step leading to the release
of transmitter quanta, there is a substantial involvement of ion
channels. In this review, the multitude of ion channels in the
presynaptic terminal are surveyed. There are at least 12 different
major categories of ion channels representing several tens of different
ion channel types; the number of different ion channel molecules at
presynaptic nerve terminals is many hundreds. We describe the different
ion channel molecules at the surface membrane and inside the nerve terminal in the context of their possible role in the process of
transmitter release. Frequently, a number of different ion channel
molecules, with the same basic function, are present at the same nerve
terminal. This is especially evident in the cases of calcium channels
and potassium channels. This abundance of ion channels allows for a
physiological and pharmacological fine tuning of the process of
transmitter release and thus of synaptic transmission.
