Differential roles of NR2A and NR2B-containing NMDA receptors in LTP and LTD in the CA1 region of two-week old rat hippocampus

Alcohol Inhibits NR2B-Containing NMDA Receptors in the Ventral Bed Nucleus of the Stria Terminalis

“…Supporting this idea is the finding that while both Ro 25-6981 and ifenprodil produce a roughly 50% inhibition of the NMDA-EPSC in wild-type neurons, they do not alter the NMDA-EPSC kinetics, as was seen in the CeA (Lopez de Armentia and Sah, 2003). If the NMDA-EPSC were mediated by receptors composed of two distinct diheteromeric populations, then removal of the slower NR1/NR2B NMDAR current, using either Ro 25-6981 or ifenprodil, would result in an alteration of kinetics, as seen in the hippocampus from 2-week-old rat hippocampus (Bartlett et al, 2006). In support of this, recent experiments demonstrated that ifenprodil has a much reduced efficacy, but similar potency, of inhibition of triheteromeric vs diheteromeric NMDARs, consistent with our observed incomplete inhibition of the NMDA-EPSC by Ro 25-6981 and ifenprodil (Hatton and Paoletti, 2005).…”

“…Rise (data not shown) and decay times of NMDA-EPSCs (representative normalized traces shown in Figure 2c) were unaltered following application of both Ro 25-6981 ( Figure 2d, Table 2) and ifenprodil (Table 2). Although ifenprodil and Ro 25-6981 have been shown to substantially alter the decay kinetics at synapses where diheteromeric NR2B NMDARs make significant contributions (Bartlett et al, 2006), at other synapses a similar lack of effects on kinetics has been observed (Lopez de Armentia and Sah, 2003). Given the lack of an effective pharmacological tool to explore the role of the NR2A subunit (see Berberich et al, 2005;Weitlauf et al, 2005;Frizelle et al, 2006;Neyton and Paoletti, 2006;Kash and Winder, 2007), we utilized NR2A KO mice to determine the functional synaptic presence of the NR2A subunit in the vBNST.…”

Leptin regulation of hippocampal synaptic function in health and disease

“…R. Soc. B 369: 20130155 plasticity at different developmental stages [40][41][42]. In a similar manner, distinct NMDA receptor subunits are required for the bi-directional effects of leptin on hippocampal synaptic function.…”

The rat perirhinal cortex: A review of anatomy, physiology, plasticity, and function

“…As the NR2A subunit is associated with LTP and the NR2B subunit is associated with LTD (Massey et al, 2004;Toyoda et al, 2005;Bartlett et al, 2007;Yashiro and Philpot, 2008), this implies that both perirhinal LTPand LTD-like processes are required for the formation of object recognition memories. Furthermore, transgenic overexpression of the NR2B subunit in hippocampal and cortical neurons enhances performance in an object recognition task yet does not promote LTD in the area CA1 (Wang et al, 2009) which is a conflicting finding compared to the majority of research in this area.…”