The Aquaporin Water Channels

The aquaporin water channels.

The topic of my talk, the aquaporins, is something that we have been studying in our lab for the last 15 years. It is not something that I anticipated when starting my career. In fact, I am a hematologist, but in science, sometimes what we find is not what we are looking for. A typical middle-aged man, I weigh 75 kg, of which 50 are water. This is something that we all share. Water is the major...

The aquaporin family of molecular water channels.

The aquaporins (AQPs) are a family of intrinsic membrane proteins that function as water-selective channels in the plasma membranes of the cells of many watertransporting tissues (1, 2). The first AQP to be identified, CHIP28 (later called AQP-CHIP), was purified by Agre and his colleagues from human erythrocytes in the late 1980s and its cDNA sequence was reported in 1991 (reviewed in ref. 2)....

Aquaporin Water Channels: Physiology and Medicine

Aquaporins (AQPs) are a tetramer structure with independent channels. The structure was discovered in 1991 by Preston and Agre. The channels are widely expressed throughout the body. Currently there are at least 10 isoforms of AQPs recognized namely AQP (0-9). Primarily AQPs function as water channel and expressed at the sites where rapid fluid transport is to occur such as kidneys, lungs, brai...

Aquaporin water channels in exocrine glands.

Structure and function of aquaporin water channels.

The aquaporins (AQPs) are a family of small membrane-spanning proteins (monomer size approximately 30 kDa) that are expressed at plasma membranes in many cells types involved in fluid transport. This review is focused on the molecular structure and function of mammalian aquaporins. Basic features of aquaporin structure have been defined using mutagenesis, epitope tagging, and spectroscopic and ...