Evolution of Artificial Ion Channel

Evolution of thermoTRP ion channel homologs in vertebrates.

In mammalian thermosensation, nine temperature-sensitive ion channels that are activated by distinct temperature thresholds have been identified as thermosensors. These ion channels belong to the transient receptor potential (TRP) superfamily and are referred to as "thermoTRPs" (TRPV1, TRPV2, TRPV3, TRPV4, TRPM2, TRPM4, TRPM5, TRPM8, and TRPA1). To elucidate the evolutionary processes of thermo...

Convergence of ion channel genome content in early animal evolution.

Multicellularity has evolved multiple times, but animals are the only multicellular lineage with nervous systems. This fact implies that the origin of nervous systems was an unlikely event, yet recent comparisons among extant taxa suggest that animal nervous systems may have evolved multiple times independently. Here, we use ancestral gene content reconstruction to track the timing of gene fami...

Ion channel activity drives ion channel expression.

Temporal evolution of helix hydration in a light-gated ion channel correlates with ion conductance.

The discovery of channelrhodopsins introduced a new class of light-gated ion channels, which when genetically encoded in host cells resulted in the development of optogenetics. Channelrhodopsin-2 from Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, CrChR2, is the most widely used optogenetic tool in neuroscience. To explore the connection between the gating mechanism and the influx and efflux of water molecules in ...

Evolution of artificial intelligence

The goal of creating non-biological intelligence has been with us for a long time, predating the nominal 1956 establishment of the field of artificial intelligence by centuries or, under some definitions, even by millennia. For much of this history it was reasonable to recast the goal of “creating” intelligence as that of “designing” intelligence. For example, it would have been reasonable in t...