Desensitization dynamics of the AMPA receptor

To perform their physiological functions, amino methyl propionic acid receptors (AMPARs) cycle through active, resting, and desensitized states, and dysfunction in AMPAR activity is associated with various neuro-logical disorders. Transitions among AMPAR functional states, however, are largely uncharacterized at atomic resolution and are difficult to examine experimentally. Here, we report long-timescale molecular dy-namics simulations of dimerized AMPAR ligand-binding domains (LBDs), whose conformational changes are tightly coupled to changes in AMPAR functional states, in which we observed LBD dimer activation and deac-tivation upon ligand binding and unbinding at atomic resolution. Importantly, we observed the ligand-bound LBD dimer transition from the active conformation to several other conformations, which may correspond with distinct desensitized conformations. We also identified a linker region whose structural rearrangements heavily affected the transitions to and among these putative desensitized conformations, and confirmed, us-ing electrophysiology experiments, the importance of the linker region in these functional transitions.