Efficacy as an Intrinsic Property of the M<sub>2</sub>Muscarinic Receptor in Its Tetrameric State
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Muscarinic and other G protein-coupled receptors exhibit an agonist-specific heterogeneity that tracks efficacy and commonly is attributed to an effect of the G protein on an otherwise homogeneous population of sites. To examine this notion, M2 muscarinic receptors were purified from Sf9 cells as monomers devoid of G protein and reconstituted as tetramers in phospholipid vesicles. In assays with N-[(3)H]methylscopolamine, seven agonists revealed a dispersion of affinities indicative of two or more classes of sites. Unlabeled N-methylscopolamine and the antagonist quinuclidinylbenzilate recognized one class of sites; atropine recognized two classes with a preference that was the opposite of that of agonists, as indicated by the effects of N-ethylmaleimide. The data were inconsistent with an explicit model of constitutive asymmetry within a tetramer, and the fit improved markedly upon the introduction of cooperative interactions (P < 0.00001). Purified monomers appeared to be homogeneous or nearly so to all ligands except the partial agonists pilocarpine and McN-A-343, where heterogeneity emerged from intramolecular cooperativity between the orthosteric site and an allosteric site. The breadth of each dispersion was quantified empirically as the area between the fitted curve for two classes of sites and the theoretical curve for a single class of lower affinity, which approximates the expected effect of GTP if a G protein were present. The areas measured for 10 ligands at reconstituted tetramers correlated with similar measures of heterogeneity and with intrinsic activities reported previously for binding and response in natural membranes (P ≤ 0.00002). The data suggest that the GTP-sensitive heterogeneity typically revealed by agonists at M2 receptors is intrinsic to the receptor in its tetrameric state. It exists independently of the G protein, and it appears to arise at least in part from cooperativity between linked orthosteric sites.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".