The D2 dopamine receptor mediates many of the physiological effects of the neurotransmitter dopamine, being involved in control of motor function and certain aspects of behaviour in the brain (Iversen, 1976) and of prolactin and a-melanocyte stimulating hormone release in the pituitary (Caron et a/., 1978;Cote et a[., 1984). Several secondmessenger systems have been proposed for D, dopamine receptor signal transduction. The most well documented of these involves coupling to adenylate cyclase via a pertussis toxin sensitive inhibitory guanine nucleotide regulatory protein (Sibley et al., 1982; Enjalbert & Bockaert, 1983: Cote et al., 1984. However, the receptor may also function through inhibition of polyphosphoinositide metabolism (Simmonds & Strange, 1985;Enjalbert et al., 1986) and stimulation of potassium channels (Israel et al., 1985; Memo et a/., 1987). A much greater understanding of the receptor signalling system would be gained if the receptor could be isolated in pure form and reconstituted together with purified effector molecules in defined artificial membrane environments. In addition, microsequencing of the pure receptor protein would permit cloning of the receptor gene.In view of these considerations we have attempted to purify iI2 dopamine receptors from bovine caudate nuclei.
Affinity matricesThe D2 receptor is present at extremely low concentrations in the caudate nucleus (approximately 400 fmol/mg of membrane protein: Leonard et a/., 1987), hence ligand affinity chromatography is likely to be an essential step in purification. We have synthesized a series of affinity matrices in which the carboxymethoxyloxime derivative of the D? dopaminergic antagonists haloperidol or spiperone (type I coupling) or the hemisuccinate derivative of haloperidol (type I1 coupling) were immobilized on Sepharose via spacer arms of differing lengths or composition.Type I1 coupling was the more efficient technique, immobilizing, for example, 709 k 1 14 nmol haloperidol/ml w-aminohexyl Sepharose (mean t-S.E.M. of five observations) as compared to 229 k 29 nmol/ml for type I coupling. It is not possible, using conventional ligand binding techniques, to determine the receptor affinity of the Sepharose-coupled ligands. However, we were able to gain some measure of the effect of coupling on affinity using ligands coupled to bovine serum albumin (BSA) in competition binding studies. Both coupling methods reduced the affinity of the ligands for receptor, though the effect of type I1 coupling was less marked than type 1 ( K , values for the inhibition of [3H]spiperone binding to solubilized receptor were 33 nM for haloperidol, 1900 nM for the BSA-haloperidol type 1 conjugate Abbreviations used: BSA, bovine serum albumin; WGL, wheat germ lectin; SDS/PAGE, SDS/polyacrylamide-gel electrophoresis; AMS, azidomethylspiperone. and 1010 nM for the BSA-haloperidol type I1 conjugate). The type I spiperone conjugate had the highest affinity for receptor ( K , 270 nM) though this is still considerably below its affinity in the uncoupled...