Molecular Approaches to the Nervous System

Hybridoma and recombinant DNA technologies promise a major advance in our understanding of the molecular basis of the function of the nervous system. The issues we hope to approach with these new tools include (a) the molecular determinants of membrane permeability, (b) cellular heterogeneity of the nervous system, and (c) the epigenetic events of neural development. Because the application of these new approaches is only recent, it is not possible at this stage to predict full answers, but only to describe the strategies that promise to be success ful. This review is an introduction to the early applications of these technologies to neuroscience and is deliberately selective, emphasizing a few specific problems in the hope that these strategies may be generally applicable to many areas of interest in neurobiology.