Experimental Models in Serotonin Transporter Research

Introduces and explicates the role of the serotonin transporter - one of the key transporter proteins in behavioural pharmacology and neuropsychiatry - in the human and animal brain. The book demonstrates the relevance of the transporter and explains how this knowledge is translated into valid animal models that foster new discoveries in human neurobiology.

The serotonin transporter is a key brain protein that modulates the reuptake of the neurotransmitter serotonin from synaptic spaces back into the presynaptic neuron. This control over neuronal signalling makes it a prime area of neuroscientific study. In this book an international team of top experts introduce and explicate the role of serotonin and the serotonin transporter in both human and animal brains. They demonstrate the relevance of the transporter and indeed the serotonergic system to substrates of neuropsychiatric disorders, and explain how this knowledge is translated into valid animal models that will help foster new discoveries in human neurobiology. Writing for graduate students and academic researchers, they provide a comprehensive coverage of a wide spectrum of data from animal experimentation to clinical psychiatry, creating the only book exclusively dedicated to this exciting new avenue of brain research.