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Ion channels

Coughing up flu's proton channels

Nature volume 451, pages 532–533 (2008)Cite this article

Two research teams have captured snapshots of the influenza virus's membrane-bound hydrogen-ion channel, which is essential for infection and virulence. Their findings agree on the basics, but differ in details.

The paperstorm of research directives blowing out of our biomedical policy offices sometimes drives me to take emotional shelter in a precept of one of my old professors: “Applied research, applied well, soon becomes basic research.” The common flu virus illustrates the broad wisdom of this maxim. Influenza and its human vector, playing a cat-and-mouse game for millennia, have come to a rather civilized understanding: you spread me around and I'll spare you to cough another day. Now that the bird-flu media hysterics have died down, we can once again view influenza dispassionately, as a prevalent disease carried by a low-virulence virus with a nasty penchant for — just to keep the game interesting — infrequent but lethal tantrums. This familiar malady has motivated decades of applied (now coyly termed 'translational') research that, instead of a magic bullet, has yielded deep insights across a broad swath of molecular mechanisms in biology, from RNA-based information-processing to weapons of immunological destruction to membrane fusion.

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Figure 1: Depictions of the M2 proton channel.

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  1. Christopher Miller is in the Department of Biochemistry, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts 02454, USA. cmiller@brandeis.edu,

    Christopher Miller

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  1. Christopher Miller
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Miller, C. Coughing up flu's proton channels. Nature 451, 532–533 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/451532a

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