Category: Featured Research

Ming-Feng Tsai and Christopher Miller summarize our recent work as, “Chowdhury and colleagues report thermodynamics-inspired experiments that productively attack a long-lingering problem in sensory neurobiology: how certain ion channel proteins achieve the exquisite thermosensitivity that allows the neurons housing them—and us—to detect changes in temperature.”  Read more from Tsai’s commentary in “Building a Temperature-Sensitive Ion Channel.”

Frank Bosmans wrote a commentary of our article, “Tethered spectroscopic probes estimate dynamic distances with subnanometer resolution in voltage-dependent potassium channels,” where he compared the tether length to a dog leash.  Longer tethers allow the dog to quench the fluorophore bone, and shorter ones do not.  Bosman’s article is titled, “New rule(r)s for FRET.“

Christopher A. Ahern summarizes our recent paper as a “voltage sensor–disabling approach to systematically investigate the identity of the molecular trigger for inactivation and confirm the role for the domain four (DIV S4) voltage sensor in this key physiological process.” Read more in Ahern’s commentary article, “What activates inactivation?“

Ofer Yifrach talks about our recent article in his commentary, “No model in mind: A model-free approach for studying ionchannel gating,” in the Journal of General Physiology.

Christopher Miller puts our recent article in a broader context in his commentary, “Model-free free energy for voltage-gated channels,” in the Journal of General Physiology.