Molecular biology and respiratory disease. 5. Molecular biology of receptors: implications for lung disease.

Receptors have a critical role in regulating lung function in health and disease.'Several such receptors have recently been sequenced, cloned, and genetically expressed.This opens up new vistas for investigating receptor regu- lation in pulmonary cells, for identifying receptor subtypes, and for understanding how disease may affect these regulatory processes.In the future it may also lead to new and more specific therapeutic approaches.This article attempts to discuss some of the areas in which molecular approaches have been used to study receptor structure and regulation.At present, these novel techniques have hardly been applied to pulmonary tissues and lung disease, but it is clear that these are extraordinarily powerful tools that may now address previously unanswerable questions.