While presynaptic effects of nAChRs have been the focus of a great deal of work, effects of nicotinic stimulation are clearly not exclusively presynaptic (Figure 1). Exogenous application of nicotine can induce significant inward currents in neurons in a number of brain areas (Léna and Changeux, 1999; Picciotto et al., 1995; Picciotto et al., 1998), and there have been several examples of direct post-synaptic effects of ACh in the brain (Alkondon et al., 1998; Jones et al., 1999). Notably, recent studies using optogenetic techniques demonstrated that ACh can mediate postsynaptic responses through nAChRs in hippocampus (Bell et al., 2011; Gu and Yakel, 2011) and cortex (Arroyo et al., 2012).
