Editor's Summary
15 December 2005
With one bond
How the protonation state of ionizable residues in proteins is modulated by the microenvironment is fundamental to many processes at the interface of biology, chemistry and physics. It is has long been recognized as an experimentally elusive, if not intractable, phenomenon. Now a new approach, combining protein engineering and single-channel patch-clamp methods, makes it possible to detect individual proton binding and unbinding events with microsecond time-resolution in muscle nicotinic receptors.
Article: Probing ion-channel pores one proton at a time
Gisela D. Cymes, Ying Ni and Claudio Grosman
doi:10.1038/nature04293
Abstract | Full Text | PDF (449K) | Supplementary information
