Abstract
Taurine has been assigned two types of putative physiological functions in the central nervous system. On the one hand, taurine has been shown to cause hyperpolarization, to increase membrane chloride conductance and to inhibit neuronal activity (14). These effects have initiated hypotheses of taurine acting as an inhibitory neurotransmitter (2) or — more likely — a neuromodulator (15). On the other hand, already a number of years ago taurine was recognized as an osmoregulator in marine animals (27), and recently it has been strongly advocated to possess the same role also in the brains of terrestrial animals, including mammals and man (20, 32, 33). According to this thinking the stimulus-evoked release of taurine from nervous tissue is only a consequence of excitation-coupled cell swelling (25).
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Oja, S.S., Saransaari, P. (1994). Relations of Taurine Release and Influx to Cell Volumes in Cerebral Cortical Slices. In: Huxtable, R.J., Michalk, D. (eds) Taurine in Health and Disease. Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology, vol 359. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1471-2_27
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1471-2_27
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