Cellular Respiration, Reactive Oxygen Species and Mitochondrial Disease
Before having his head chopped off by French revolutionaries in 1794, the ‘father of modern chemistry’ Antoine Lavoisier made numerous important discoveries. One of his most significant discoveries was that the respiration of animals, the energy releasing process that transforms the oxygen that we breathe and the sugars that we eat into carbon dioxide and … Continue reading
Pores and Selectivity Filters
In this post I will be briefly introducing the classical ideas of ion conduction through membrane proteins. The idea of ion channels as selective pores in the cell membrane is very old but is now understood at atomic detail. So what is a channel? What does an ion conductive pore look like? Here, I will … Continue reading
Human Hv1: Architectural Overview
Although voltage-gated proton currents have been measured in cell membranes since the early 1980s (Tomas & Meech, 1982), the genes encoding the voltage-gated proton channels were not discovered until 2006 (Sasaki et al., 2006; Ramsey et al., 2006). What the gene sequence demonstrated was that Hv channels share sequence homology with the voltage-sensor domains (VSDs) of … Continue reading
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