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Annual Review of Biophysics

Volume 52, 2023

Mechanism of Activation of the Visual Receptor Rhodopsin

  • Steven O. Smith1
  • Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Center for Structural Biology, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York, USA; email: [email protected]
  • Vol. 52:301-317 (Volume publication date May 2023)
  • Copyright © 2023 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information

Abstract

Rhodopsin is the photoreceptor in human rod cells responsible for dim-light vision. The visual receptors are part of the large superfamily of G protein–coupled receptors (GPCRs) that mediate signal transduction in response to diverse diffusible ligands. The high level of sequence conservation within the transmembrane helices of the visual receptors and the family A GPCRs has long been considered evidence for a common pathway for signal transduction. I review recent studies that reveal a comprehensive mechanism for how light absorption by the retinylidene chromophore drives rhodopsin activation and highlight those features of the mechanism that are conserved across the ligand-activated GPCRs.

Keyword(s): G protein–coupled receptor, GPCR, mechanism, rhodopsin, structure, vision
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2023-05-09
2025-06-13
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Mechanism of Activation of the Visual Receptor Rhodopsin
Annual Review of Biophysics 52, 301 (2023); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-biophys-083122-094909
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-biophys-083122-094909
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-biophys-083122-094909
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