It is well established that the glial glutamate transporter-1 (GLT-1) is the most abundant and most important glutamate transporter in the central nervous system (Matsugami et al., 2006; Mitani and Tanaka, 2003; Rao et al., 2001) . GLT-1 plays a crucial role in terminating glutamate neurotransmission and in maintaining extracellular glutamate below neurotoxic levels (Chu et al., 2007; Kosugi and Kawahara, 2006; Romera et al., 2004) . Consequently, many studies have focused on the expression and func-