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Modeling Of Excitatory Amino Acid Transporters And Clearance Of Synaptic Cleft On Millisecond Time Scale, Denis M. Shchepakin, Leonid Kalachev, Michael Kavanaugh

Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences Faculty Publications

Excitatory Amino Acid Transporters (EAATs) operate over wide time scales in the brain. They maintain low ambient concentrations of the primary excitatory amino acid neurotransmitter glutamate, but they also seem to play a significant role in clearing glutamate from the synaptic cleft in the millisecond time-scale process of chemical communication that occurs between neurons. The detailed kinetic mechanisms underlying glutamate uptake and clearance remain incompletely understood. In this work we used a combination of methods to model EAAT kinetics and gain insight into the impact of transport on glutamate dynamics in a general sense. We derive reliable estimates of the …