Publications from the Jorgensen Laboratory

One would think that a mouse lacking the major excitatory neurotransmitter in the brain would be a dead mouse, and indeed it is--but it's not nearly as dead as one might have thought. Two groups have knocked out the gene for the main vesicular glutamate transporter, VGLUT1, and surprisingly, these mice live for several months. The studies by Fremeau et al. (1) on page 1815 in this issue and by Wojcik et al. in a recent issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A. (2) both look at transporter expression, trafficking, and mechanisms of vesicle loading in VGLUT1 mutant mice. However, the two studies present different models for subcellular localization of the vesicular transporter and for vesicle loading.