Watching neurotransmission in vitro.

A well-established approach to study a cellular process is to reconstitute the system in vitro. Researchers in several laboratories, including that of Axel Brunger at Stanford University, have been using this strategy to understand neurotransmitter release. In a recently published paper, Brunger and colleagues describe an in vitro system that qualitatively recapitulates several of the fundamental characteristics of the process as it occurs in neurons.