Ion channels are an important class of drug targets. They comprise the molecular basis for essential physiological functions including fluid secretion, electrolyte balance, bioenergetics and membrane excitability. High-throughput screening for ion-channel function requires sensitive, simple assays and instrumentation that will report ion channel activity in living cells. This article will revie...

Ion channel gene expression can vary substantially among neurons of a given type, even though neuron-type-specific firing properties remain stable and reproducible. The mechanisms that modulate ion channel gene expression and stabilize neural firing properties are unknown. In Drosophila, we demonstrate that loss of the Shal potassium channel induces the compensatory rebalancing of ion channel e...

Since the first Hodgkin and Huxley ion channel model was described in the 1950s, there has been an explosion in mathematical models to describe ion channel function. As experimental data has become richer, models have concomitantly been improved to better represent ion channel kinetic processes, although these improvements have generally resulted in more model complexity and an increase in the ...

Conotoxins in the venom of cone snails (Conus spp.) are a mixture of active peptides that work as blockers, agonists, antagonists, or inactivators of various ion channels. Recently we reported a high-throughput method to identify 215 conotoxin transcripts from the Chinese tubular cone snail, C. betulinus. Here, based on the previous datasets of four transcriptomes from three venom ducts and one...

Introduction: It has recently been suggested that the KATP channel subunits Kir6.x and BKCa channels exist in the endoplasmic reticulum of cardiomyocytes and neurons. Our previous studies showed the electrophysiological behavior of cation channels in the rough endoplasmic reticulum (RER) of rat hepatocytes. Therefore, we hypothesized that KATP channels and Ca2+-activated potassium channels m...

We present single-ion-channel recordings performed with biomimetic lipid membranes which are directly attached to the surface of a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) preamplifier chip. With this system we resolve single-channel currents from several types of bacterial ion channels, including fluctuations of a single alamethicin channel at a bandwidth of 1 MHz which represent the fas...

Electrical signaling in neurons is mediated by the opening and closing of large numbers of individual ion channels. The ion channels' state transitions are stochastic and introduce fluctuations in the macroscopic current through ion channel populations. This creates an unavoidable source of intrinsic electrical noise for the neuron, leading to fluctuations in the membrane potential and spontane...

unsteady hydromagnetic generalised couette flow of a viscous, incompressible and electrically conducting fluid between two horizontal parallel porous plates darcian channel in the presence of a uniform transverse magnetic field taking hall current and ion-slip into account in a rotating system is investigated. an exact solution of the governing equations is obtained by laplace transform techniq...