Determinants of the anesthetic sensitivity of neuronal nicotinic acetylcholine receptors.

Some neurotransmitter-gated ion channels are very much more sensitive to general anesthetics than others, even when they are genetically and structurally related. The most striking example of this is the extreme sensitivity of heteromeric neuronal nicotinic acetylcholine receptors to inhalational general anesthetics compared with the marked insensitivity of the closely related homomeric neuronal nicotinic receptors. Here we investigate the role of the alpha subunit in determining the anesthetic sensitivity of these receptors by using alpha(3)/alpha(7) chimeric subunits that are able to form functional homomeric receptors.