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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2018 Dec 3.
Published in final edited form as: Mol Cell Neurosci. 2018 May 16;91:82–94. doi: 10.1016/j.mcn.2018.05.002

Fig. 3. Mechanisms underlying the dynamic positioning of glutamate receptors.

Fig. 3

(A) Side view of a synapse showing the subsynaptic distribution of the AMPA-, NMDA- and mGluR1/5-type receptors established by mechanisms regulating the synaptic entry and retention of these glutamate receptor types. The zoom of the synapse in side view reveals possible mechanisms underlying the distinct subsynaptic positioning of the glutamate receptor types; transient retention of glutamate receptors via intracellular interactions with scaffolding proteins and extracellular interactions with synaptic cleft proteins, and steric hindrance due to molecular crowding of the different synaptic components and cytoskeletal hindrance at the border of the PSD. (B) Side view of the tetrameric AMPAR (blue) in complex with Stargazin (magenta) based on (Greger et al., 2017) (left), and dimeric mGluR1/5 coupled to its cognate Gq-proteins (green) based on (Nishimura et al., 2010) (right). This figure shows the Y-shaped GluA2 homomer (Greger et al., 2017) and the closed-closed resting conformation of an mGluR dimer (Muto et al., 2007). Models are approached to scale.