Title: Looking for the Inward Facing State of Glutamate Transporters
Abstract: A recent crystal structure of the bacterial glutamate transporter homologue GltPh (Reyes et al., 2009) was interpreted as the inward facing state of glutamate transporter. Comparing this inward facing structure to the earlier outward facing structures of GltPh suggested that glutamate transporters undergo a large conformational change between these two states. In contrast, earlier FRET experiments from our group (Koch and Larsson, 2005) suggested that the mammalian glutamate transporter EAAT3 does not undergo large conformational changes during the uptake cycle.