Abstract
Curare has long been regarded as a typical competitive antagonist of acetylcholine (ACh) at the vertebrate neuromuscular junction. Recently, however, it has been shown that curare can also block the channels opened by ACh at the frog neuromuscular junction as well as on rat and Aplysia neurons1–4; moreover, curare is able to depolarize rat myotubes and thus behaves as an agonist for the cholinergic receptor of this preparation5 (see ref. 6). Using the single channel recording technique7,8, we have now found that, on rat myotubes, curare can both open and block in the same cell the channels controlled by the cholinergic receptor.
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Trautmann, A. Curare can open and block ionic channels associated with cholinergic receptors. Nature 298, 272–275 (1982). https://doi.org/10.1038/298272a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/298272a0
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