Cracking Tough Nuts

Cracking Tough Nuts
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.”

Commentary on tethered spectroscopic blockers by Frank Bosmans

Commentary on tethered spectroscopic blockers by Frank Bosmans
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.“

“Systematic Investigation,” commentary from C. Ahern

“Systematic Investigation,” commentary from C. Ahern
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?“

Linkage analysis toolkit by Dan Sigg

An introductory video on Linkage analysis by our collaborator, Dan Sigg. This video abstract accompanied two back to back articles in the Journal of General Physiology on the application of Linkage analysis to probe molecular basis of allosteric interactions. Chowdhury, S. and Chanda, B. (2013) Free-energy relationships in ion channels activated by voltage and ligand.Journal […]

Estimating the free energy change: JGP Video Abstract

The Journal of General Physiology published a video abstract for our lab describing how we estimate the free energy change for ion channels. This video relates to our article: Chowdhury, S., and Chanda, B. (2012) Estimating the voltage-dependent free energy change of ion channels using the median voltage of activation.Journal of General Physiology 139 (1): […]