Salt provides 2 life-essential elements: sodium and chlorine. Chloride, the ionic form of chlorine, derived exclusively from dietary absorption and constituting the most abundant anion in the human body, plays critical roles in many vital physiologic functions, from fluid retention and secretion to osmotic maintenance and pH balance. However, an often overlooked role of chloride is its function...

The Maxi-chloride channel was the first ion channel described by electrophysiological methods in placenta. Because it is difficult to access a complex epithelium such as the placenta for electrophysiological procedures, the studies of ion channels from placental membranes have been performed only very recently. It was only in 1993 that a direct demonstration of a high-conductance chloride chann...

The time course of currents mediated by native and recombinant glycine receptors was examined with a combination of rapid agonist applications to outside-out patches and single-channel recording. The deactivation time constant of currents evoked by brief, saturating pulses of glycine is profoundly affected by the chloride concentration on the intracellular side of the cell membrane. Deactivatio...

The well known chloride channel from Torpedo has been a round since 1979 (White and Miller, 1979), but it continues to supply us with new surprises. In this issue of The Journal of General Physiology Chen and Miller analyze in great detail the voltageand chloride-dependent activation mechanism of the peculiar "double-barreled" channel (Chen and Miller, 1996), which turns out to be completely di...

The well known chloride channel from Torpedo has been a round since 1979 (White and Miller, 1979), but it continues to supply us with new surprises. In this issue of The Journal of General Physiology Chen and Miller analyze in great detail the voltageand chloride-dependent activation mechanism of the peculiar "double-barreled" channel (Chen and Miller, 1996), which turns out to be completely di...

The well known chloride channel from Torpedo has been a round since 1979 (White and Miller, 1979), but it continues to supply us with new surprises. In this issue of The Journal of General Physiology Chen and Miller analyze in great detail the voltageand chloride-dependent activation mechanism of the peculiar "double-barreled" channel (Chen and Miller, 1996), which turns out to be completely di...

The ClC protein family includes voltage-gated chloride channels and chloride/proton exchangers. In eukaryotes, ClC proteins regulate membrane potential of excitable cells, contribute to epithelial transport, and aid in lysosomal acidification. Although structure/function studies of ClC proteins have been aided greatly by the available crystal structures of a bacterial ClC chloride/proton exchan...

PURPOSE The human fetal cell line RPE 28 SV4 has been useful for studies of oxidative stress and apoptosis in retinal pigmented epithelium. This cell model is now assessed in functional investigations of chloride channel activity. The study aims to determine the presence of specific chloride channels, including CFTR and ClC channels, to identify the properties of membrane chloride currents and ...

CFTR is a chloride channel whose gating process involves coordinated interactions among the regulatory (R) domain and the nucleotide-binding folds (NBFs). Protein kinase A phosphorylation of serine residues renders the R domain from inhibitory to stimulatory and enables ATP binding and hydrolysis at the NBFs, which in turn control opening and closing of the chloride channel.

Ivermectin is an oral semi-synthetic lactone anthelmintic agent derived from avermectins isolated from fermentation products of Streptomyces avermitilis. Ivermectin showed a concentration-dependent inhibitory effect on motility of a free-living nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans). There exist specific binding sites having a high affinity for ivermectin in the membrane fraction of C. e...