Advances in sodium-ion coupled biogenic amine transporters

The sodium-ion coupled transporters for 5-hydroxytryptamine (5HT), noradrenaline and dopamine function to reduce extracellular levels of biogenic amines. Over the past fifteen years selective inhibitors of these transport systems have been developed including fluoxetine, citalopram, paroxetine, litoxetine (for 5HT), nisoxetine, desipramine, maprotiline (for noradrenaline) and GBR-12935 (for dopamine). Some of these inhibitors, including drugs selective for noradrenaline transport and particularly those selective for the 5HT transport system are currently widely used in the clinical management of affective disorders. Selective biogenic amine uptake inhibitors have, in addition, provided tools to undertake molecular pharmacological and biochemical studies of their respective transporters. By this means, the rat brain 5HT and dopamine transporters have been identified as polypeptides with relative molecular masses of 73,000 and 80,000, respectively, using affinity-chromatographic purification and photoaffinity-labelling techniques. Recently, the biogenic amine transporters have been cloned and a comparison of their predicted amino acid sequences reveals that these proteins share a considerable degree of similarity with notably 12–13 transmembrane spanning domains. Perspectives for future fundamental and clinical research on biogenic amine transport systems using molecular biological techniques are discussed.