#Neurotransmitters

🧫 The synaptic terminal has these entities here, which are called synaptic vesicles, and they're small, little organelles.

🧫 They're little vesicles made of a membrane; just like the cell has a cell membrane, these vesicles have a vesicular membrane.
The neurotransmitters are within the vesicular membrane.

🧫 And, the neurotransmitter can be any number of a number of different molecules — #Glutamate, #GABA, #Serotonin, #Dopamine, #Acetylcholine, #Glycine, #Norepinephrine, #Epinephrine, #Histamine, #ATP.

🧫 The neurotransmitters are packaged in vesicles. The second thing that's important about this is that we can use the synthesis of a #neurotransmitter as a therapeutic tool.

🧫 So, for instance, Dopamine is missing in #ParkinsonsDisease.
It's not that dopamine isn't made per say, that's there's a problem with making it — it's that the cells that make it die.

🧫 There's something called 'Mass Effect', which means that you take the starting chemical (the substrate) and then through a series of enzymatic processes reaction, through a series of enzymatic reactions, we end up with a neurotransmitter.

🧫 In the case of Dopamine, what we do to treat in most people with Parkinson's is that we give them the substrate — and so that (drug) is what is commonly known as #Sinemet or #Parcopa.

🧫 So we flood the system with substrate, and the goal is to get a little bit of that neurotransmitter out of the system.

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