Scaffold Proteins in the Postsynaptic Density

Many intractable neurological and mental diseases, including epilepsy, depression, and schizophrenia, are believed to result, in part, from derangements of regulation of synaptic transmission in the brain. For this reason, much effort has been made to discover how the delicate mechanisms of signal transduction at synapses lead to modification of synaptic strength. One fruitful area of research over the last twenty years has been the postsynaptic signaling apparatus in glutamatergic spines (8, 97, 99, 106). Spines contain clusters of receptors and signaling proteins located in a dense submembranous structure that can be seen in the electron microscope and is called the postsynaptic density or PSD (For review of early work see 98).