5ht2a Receptor Activity

[moracca]

Hi. I'm not sure if this is the right place for this post, as it might not be "advanced enough," but I have a question that has never made much sense to me, and when I UTFSE I really only find posts that kind of take it as common knowledge and gloss over it. my question is this:

most psychedelic drugs rely mostly on agonism at the 5ht2a receptors, correct? Well it is my understanding that the receptors at the synapses can either fire or not, ie, either the receptor recieves its stimulus and sends the message or it doesn't, no inbetween. So then, how is there so much of a difference when a drug like LSD binds to the receptor than when serotonin binds to the receptor. I don't know how to word this right but hopefully you get what I'm asking. If its either on or off, how can one agonist have a different effect than another?

Thanks for your help, and sorry if this is a rudimentary question, but its just something that's bugged me.

 

[BilZ0r]

You've gotten mixed up. Synapses can pass graded information. It is action potentials which are all or none. That's the whole point of synapses is that they can act anywhere between 0-100%. The action of that is probably more important at ionotropic synapses (which you need 100s of synapses active to make a neuron fire). So not only is their variability post synaptically, but there is variability presyanptically, in the amount of vesicles released (or the likelyhood of vesicle released at all)

 

[moracca]

thanks bilz0r. Sometimes I feel like a real idiot. Too much droning by my college A+P prof, perhaps anyway, thanks for clearing that up for me

//moracca