Acetylcholine and Acetylcholine Receptors: Textbook Knowledge and New Data

摘要

It was a pleasure to receive a proposal to organize and be a guest editor of a Special Issue of This is the field in which I am working and personally know some of the leading scientists. My narrow field is the research on the peptide and protein neurotoxins from animal venoms and their application as sophisticated tools for analysis of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs). Recently, together with my colleagues from several European laboratories, I was a guest editor for the Special Issue of devoted to diverse neurotoxins acting on various ligand-gated or voltage-gated ion channels. In this Special Issue, it was decided to focus mostly on the nAChRs. The word “acetylcholine” in the title of the issue is due to the interest in the mechanism of action of this naturally-occurring agonist and also in other endogenous or synthetic compounds regulating nAChR functions and having the potential to lead to novel drugs. Since there are examples where a compound acts on different targets, like galanthamine which inhibits acetylcholinestrase, but is a positive allosteric modulator of the α7 nAChR, or some non-conventional snake venom neurotoxins interacting with both nAChRs and with muscarinic receptors, we decided to cover, although with less detail, muscarinic acetylcholine receptors.