Human Cys-loop receptors are important therapeutic targets. High-resolution structures are essential for rational drug design, but only a few are available due to difficulties in obtaining sufficient quantities of protein suitable for structural studies. Although expression of proteins in E. coli offers advantages of high yield, low cost, and fast turnover, this approach has not been thoroughly explored for full-length human Cys-loop receptors because of the conventional wisdom that E. coli lacks the specific chaperones and post-translational modifications potentially required for expression of human Cys-loop receptors. Here we report the successful production of full-length wild type human ␣7nAChR from E. coli. Chemically induced chaperones promote high expression levels of well-folded proteins. The choice of detergents, lipids, and ligands during purification determines the final protein quality. The purified ␣7nAChR not only forms pentamers as imaged by negativestain electron microscopy, but also retains pharmacological characteristics of native ␣7nAChR, including binding to bungarotoxin and positive allosteric modulators specific to ␣7nAChR. Moreover, the purified ␣7nAChR injected into Xenopus oocytes can be activated by acetylcholine, choline, and nicotine, inhibited by the channel blockers QX-222 and phencyclidine, and potentiated by the ␣7nAChR specific modulators PNU-120596 and TQS. The successful generation of functional human ␣7nAChR from E. coli opens a new avenue for producing mammalian Cys-loop receptors to facilitate structure-based rational drug design.Human Cys-loop receptors are promising therapeutic targets for various neurological disorders and diseases (1-4). Structure-based drug design for these receptors requires their high-resolution structures (5). Although Cys-loop receptors contain only four major receptor types, including nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs), 2 serotonin 5-HT3 receptors, glycine receptors, and GABA A receptors, each receptor type often has multiple subtypes that form numerous functional distinct receptors. Among the human Cys-loop receptors, highresolution structures have been obtained for only the 3 GABA A and ␣3 glycine receptors (6, 7). Structures for other eukaryotic Cys-loop receptors include the mouse serotonin 5-HT3A receptor (8), the zebrafish ␣1 glycine receptor (9), the Caenorhabditis elegans GluCl (10, 11) and the muscle-type nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR) from Torpedo marmorota (12). The dichotomy between the small number of available structures and the relatively large receptor population in the superfamily indicates the technical difficulties for structural determination of these receptors. One of the greatest challenges for structural determination of Cys-loop receptors and similarly complex human membrane proteins is the production of a large quantity of well-folded functional proteins.The ␣7 nAChR (␣7nAChR) is one of the most abundant nAChR subtypes found in the brain (13,14). It is also expressed in a wide variety of non-neuronal tiss...