Eric Gouaux and his colleagues mapped the structure of a glutamate receptor, a protein that mediates signalling between neurons in the brain and elsewhere in the nervous system. The receptor is also thought to be crucial to processes such as memory and learning.
The resulting picture “tells us things about the organization of the receptor that were just completely unanticipated” says Gouaux, a protein crystallographer at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. The work appears online in Nature.