A statistical analysis of acetylcholine receptor activation in Xenopus myocytes: stepwise versus concerted models of gating.

1. The kinetic properties of single channel currents from fetal-type acetylcholine receptors in embryonic Xenopus myocytes (60 h old) have been analysed by a maximum-likelihood method. 2. At very high acetylcholine (ACh) concentrations (up to 5 mM) the effective opening rate appears to saturate at approximately 30,000 s-1. 3. The kinetics were analysed according to the standard concerted scheme that postulates a single channel-opening conformational change after two agonists are bound, and a rarely invoked stepwise scheme that postulates semi-independent conformational changes in two distinct gating domains. Both models assume that agonist cannot escape from a channel (or domain) that is in its activated conformation. 4. With either activation scheme the kinetic analyses indicate that ACh binds at a rate of approximately 2 x 10(8) s-1 M-1 and dissociates from doubly liganded receptors at a rate of approximately 28,000 s-1, and that the activation process is asymmetric, i.e. the binding (concerted model) or gating (stepwise model) transitions are not equal and independent. 5. In eighteen of twenty-seven file-by-file comparisons, the likelihood of the stepwise model was greater than that of the concerted model. In seven such comparisons, the likelihood of the concerted model was greater than that of the stepwise model, and in two there was no difference. Log likelihood ratio distributions were obtained from three files (those with the most events) by multiple cycles of resampling and fitting. The means of these distributions were significantly greater than zero, indicating that the stepwise scheme was as good as, or better than, the concerted scheme in describing receptor activation. 6. According to the stepwise view, two binding sites must be occupied and two 'gates' activated for conduction to occur. Although equivalent binding is not an essential aspect of stepwise activation, the binding sites can be identical and have a low affinity for ACh (Kd approximately 130 microM). Either the isomerization rates of the gating domains are different, or they are influenced by the conformational status of its counterpart, with activation increasing approximately 3-fold and deactivation decreasing approximately 10-fold if the complementary domain is in the active conformation. Stepwise activation predicts that the decay of the endplate current is determined by five rates.