“…This regulation is made possible by the fact that all vertebrate nAChRs, including both muscle and neuronal receptors, are cation-selective ligand-gated ion channels with significant relative permeabilities to calcium. The most extreme appears to be that of nicotinic receptors containing the ␣7 gene product (Couturier et al, 1990;Schoepfer et al, 1990); they equal or exceed NMDA receptors in relative calcium permeability (Bertrand et al, 1993;Seguela et al, 1993). Such receptors (␣7-nAChRs) are one of the two most abundant nicotinic receptor subtypes expressed in brain (Sargent, 1993;Gotti et al, 1994;Lindstrom, 1996;Role and Berg, 1996;Conroy and Berg, 1998), and in contrast to NMDA receptors, they do not require the postsynaptic membrane to be depolarized before promoting calcium influx.…”