This "news and views" paper gives a summary of this article about using a bump-and-hole method to create ion channels which are activated by drugs rather than by their native substrates. (We were talking in class today about how difficult it is to make a protein with this degree of orthogonality.) The ligand-binding extracellular domain was linked to cation- or anion-selective transmembrane and intracellular domains so that nerve cells could be selectively inhibited or excited. I chose this article mainly because I thought it had a funny title, but also because it was a good summary of the research that had been done.
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