Recent Developments in Adrenergic Receptor Research

Virtually all the physiological effects of catecholamines, generally termed adrenergic effects, could be classified as being of the two major types. These two types of responses are termed as “α”- and “β”-adrenergic, respectively, and hypothesized that they were mediated by two distinct types of adrenergic receptors, α- and β-adrenergic receptors. The two receptor types were distinguished by their characteristic potency series for agonist drugs. A variety of radioactively labelled ligands, both agonists and antagonists, have been developed and applied to successful study of α- and β-adrenergic binding sites in a wide variety of tissues from a wide variety of species. Research in this area has been the subject of a number of excellent and extensive reviews in the past few years. Subsequent to the classification of adrenergic receptors into α- and β- types by Ahlquist, it became clear that there were at least two major subtypes of each of these receptors. Subtypes of α-adrenergic receptors also exist, and here the situation is somewhat more complex because there is a much greater physiological distinction between these two subtypes than is the case for the β-adrenergic receptor subtypes. © 1980, Academic Press, Inc.

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Author Robert J. Lefkowitz Medicine, Cardiology