J Neurochem 2008 Jul 01;1061:224-30. doi: 10.1111/j.1471-4159.2008.05359.x.

Amino acids outside of the loops that define the agonist binding site are important for ligand binding to insect nicotinic acetylcholine receptors.

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Nicotinic acetylcholine (ACh) receptors (nAChRs) are the targets of several kinds of insecticides. Based on the mutagenesis studies of Torpedo californica nAChRs and solved structure of a molluscan, glial-derived soluble ACh-binding protein, a model of the agonist site was constructed with contributing amino acids from three distinct loops (A, B, and C) of the alpha subunits and another three loops (D, E, and F) of the non-alpha subunits. According to this model, most insect nAChR subunits can form the functional heteromeric or homomeric receptors. Actually, insect subunits themselves did not form any functional receptor at various combinations as yet, and only part of them can form the functional receptors with vertebrate non-alpha subunits. These findings suggested that the agonist binding for insect nAChRs was not only contributed by those key amino acids in six loops, but also some unidentified amino acids from other regions. In our previous studies on nAChRs for Nilaparvata lugens, a target-site mutation (Y151S) was found within two alpha subunits (Nlalpha1 and Nlalpha3). In Drosophila S2 cells and Xenopus oocytes, Nlalpha1 can form functional receptors with rat beta2 subunit. However, the same thing was not observed in Nlalpha3. In the present paper, by exchanging the corresponding regions between Nlalpha1 and Nlalpha3 to generate different chimeras, amino acid residues or residue clusters in the regions outside the six loops were found to play essential roles in agonist binding, especially for the amino acid clusters between loop B and C. This result indicated that the residues in the six loops could be necessary, but not enough for the activity of agonist binding.

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