Stereochemistry of glutamate receptor agonist efficacy: Engineering a dual-specificity AMPA/kainate receptor

An attempt is made to show that structure-based mutation L651V converts the GluR4 AMPA receptor into a dual-specificity AMPA/kinate receptor fully activated by both agonists. Further, the correlation between agonist efficacy and a series of vibrational and fluorescence spectroscopic signals of agonist binding to the corresponding wild-type and mutant GluR4 ligand-binding domains is investigated.