Karina Aberg
To any movie buff, TM7 refers to the 1960 John Sturges movie, The Magnificent Seven, in which a 30-year-old Steve McQueen burst onto the scene fighting alongside Yul Brynner, Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn, and James Coburn to defend the homes of an oppressed Mexican peasant village. But flip it to 7TM and it's a different allusion altogether. Nowadays every biomedical scientist knows that 7TM refers to a receptor class, the G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), which have taken center stage in drug discovery and the study of cellular growth and differentiation.
But considering the amount of information about the pharmacology of these receptors acquired over the past several decades, it is surprising that we don't know more about how they really work. How does an agonist ligand activate a receptor? How is ligand specificity achieved? Why can't pharmacophores for specific receptors be designed de novo? Of course, the simple ...
