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Hello, my name is Graham Collingridge.
I'm the Director of the MRC Center for Synaptic Plasticity
at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom.
I'm also a member of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences,
at Seoul National University in Korea.
Today I'm going to be talking about
glutamate receptor modulation and
long-term synaptic plasticity in the central nervous system.
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Glutamate acts on multiple classes of receptor.
There are two types, inotropic receptors,
which can attain an integral ion channel,
and metabotropic glutamate receptors,
which link - by g-proteins - to metabolic processes.
My talk will focus on inotropic a glutamate receptors.
Of these, I will be talking about the NMDA receptor (NMDAR) and the AMPA receptor (AMPAR).
Both exist in multiple subtypes depending on the subunit composition.
In this slide I'm showing various subunits and their IUPHAR nomenclature.
For further information, please see the reference below.
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There are two major forms of long-term synaptic plasticity in the CNS,
named long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD).
Long-term potentiation, as its name suggests,
is a long-lasting increase in the efficiency of synaptic transmission at synapses,
whereas long-term depression is the long-term decrease in synaptic efficiency.
They are induced by different patterns of synaptic activation.
Typically, LTP involves brief periods of high-frequency stimulation,
such as those shown on the right-hand side of this slide,
whereas long-term depression involves
more prolonged periods of low-frequency stimulation.
It is convenient to distinguish three phases of synaptic plasticity.
The induction phase, which is the processes involved to trigger the process,
the expression phase, that is what changes to sustain the increase or decrease in synaptic efficiency,
and the transduction phase, which are the mechanisms, which link induction to expression.
In this talk, I'll be focusing on long-term potentiation,
or LTP, as it's commonly abbreviated.
This slide shows a simplified view of a typical excitatory synapse in the CNS.
