{"doi":"10.3389/fnmol.2022.1022756","title":"Drunken lipid membranes, not drunken SNARE proteins, promote fusion in a model of neurotransmitter release","abstract":"Alcohol affects many neuronal proteins that are upstream or down-stream of synaptic vesicle fusion and neurotransmitter release. Less well studied is alcohol's effect on the fusion machinery including SNARE proteins and lipid membranes. Using a SNARE-driven fusion assay we show that fusion probability is significantly increased at 0.4% v/v (68 mM) ethanol; but not with methanol up to 10%. Ethanol appears to act directly on membrane lipids since experiments focused on protein properties [circular dichroism spectrometry, site-directed fluorescence interference contrast (sdFLIC) microscopy, and vesicle docking results] showed no significant changes up to 5% ethanol, but a protein-free fusion assay also showed increased lipid membrane fusion rates with 0.4% ethanol. These data show that the effects of high physiological doses of ethanol on SNARE-driven fusion are mediated through ethanol's interaction with the lipid bilayer of membranes and not SNARE proteins, and that methanol affects lipid membranes and SNARE proteins only at high doses.","journal":"Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience","year":2022,"id":293317,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":2,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9564,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":978038,"name":"Katelyn N. Kraichely","orcid":"0000-0002-9674-3583","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":238341,"name":"Alex J.B. Kreutzberger","orcid":"0000-0002-9774-115X","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":315223,"name":"Volker Kiessling","orcid":"0000-0002-9388-5703","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":315225,"name":"Lukas K. Tamm","orcid":"0000-0002-1674-4464","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":978039,"name":"Dixon J. Woodbury","orcid":"0000-0001-9840-8503","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":978037,"name":"Robert E. Coffman","orcid":"0000-0001-8393-2062","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":80,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:30:53.818562Z","pmid":"36311016","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}