I came across a study where they used GlcNAc to clean D2 receptors from Bovine to sample.
"Under optimal conditions about 65% of the applied D2 dopamine receptors bound to WGA-agarose and could be eluted with N-acetylglucosamine."
No offense but I wish when people make posts like this they could explain it in more detail, this is about as vague as vague can be. Is this saying that NAG obliterates dopamine receptors? as far as I can tell "eluted" means to clean or remove. Or is it saying it resets them and therefore would help dopamine production?
D2 receptors are n linked glycoproteins. WGA-Agglutinin comes from wheat, corn, oats etc, it crosses the blood brain barrier and has affinity with several dopaminergic systems.
Small amounts of WGA are very pro-inflammatory. WGA can form a glycoprotein with NAG which causes even more damage.
In the study they used NAG to remove WGA from the receptors.
The original quote is describing a test tube manipulation which would have been undertaken to purify and characterise dopamine receptors.
Some type of extract from animal tissue (there is no link to the study so I can't say what), containing dopamine receptors solubilised from their membranes, was applied to a solid phase (agarose gel) which had WGA attached to it.
The lectin WGA recognises NAG, so any glycoproteins in the mixture containing NAG on the surface would bind to the gel and other substances pass through. The fact that a significant proportion of the dopamine receptors in the mixture bound to the gel indicates that they are glycoproteins containing NAG.
The bound receptor could then be eluted (released) from the gel by applying a vast excess of NAG which out-competed the binding of receptor to WGA.
This is a commonly used purification technique called affinity chromatography. A wide variety of substances can be immobilised on a gel support and used to select out substances which interact with them from a complex mixture. Some small molecule which also binds can then be applied in vast excess to recover the wanted bound substance which has now been considerably purified from the starting mixture.
The experiment says nothing whatsoever about the effect of NAG that you swallow on dopamine receptors
in situ.
Rats fed very large amounts of WGA certainly show adverse effects on the gut and a certain amount of uptake into the blood, but the authors of the study note that the amount of WGA in a normal diet has not been found to be toxic.
Similarly WGA injected intravenously (again in considerable amounts) has been observed to cross the BBB - after all it was an
experiment designed to illuminate the transcytosis pathway.
It is a big jump to go from these experimental situations to one which links dietary WGA to adverse effects on dopaminergic systems.