About this book
This volume is an outcome of a satellite symposium held on November 4th and 5th, 1978, at the Missouri Institute of Psychiatry, St. Louis, in conjunction with the eighth annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. The symposium was planned and organized in order to provide information which may help in narrowing the gap between data obtained by investigators engaged in basic neuroscience research and the clinical implications of these findings. The empirical introduction of psychopharmacological agents to clinical use in the early 1950's facilitated investigations aimed at elucidating basic mechanisms that underlie brain function and behavior. In recent years, we have witnessed developments in the opposite direction; discoveries in the laboratories of researchers in the basic neurosciences have produced new approaches in treatment of the mentally ill patient.
Receptors, the existence of which had heretofore been largely based on hypotheses, have been shown as entities which can be identified, isolated, and studied in the test tube. The complexity of receptor function has become apparent. In addition to containing binding sites for a specific neurotransmitter, the receptor exists as part of a macromolecular complex the activity of which may be modulated by neuroactive peptides and mediated by the generation of cyclic nucleotides. The cyclic nucleotides appear to exert their physiological effects by regulating protein phosphorylation-dephosphorylation cycles. Different specific phosphoproteins control metabolic events in the cell interior. In addition, membrane-bound phosphoproteins may play a role in the regulation of receptor function, and this process may be regulated by neuropeptides.
Thus, the receptor, when studied as a functional entity, may be analyzed as a multiplicity of interactions between binding sites, transmitters, modulators, mediators and specifiers in the nervous system. This book is concerned with recent studies which have sought to define the roles of neuropeptides, cyclic nucleotides, and phosphoproteins in neural function. These subjects are introduced in the first section of the volume, their potential mechanisms of action are discussed in a second section, and a third section is devoted to studies on the relevance of these systems to the etiology and treatment of some neuropsychiatric disorders. The experimental approaches described by the authors include physiological, neurochemical, pharmacological, behavioral, and clinical investigations, and clearly demonstrate the multi-disciplinary nature of current research in neuroscience.
