Quasi-specific access of the potassium channel inactivation gate

Gaurav Venkataraman, Deepa Srikumar and Miguel Holmgren ()
Additional contact information
Gaurav Venkataraman: Molecular Neurophysiology Section, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health
Deepa Srikumar: Molecular Neurophysiology Section, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health
Miguel Holmgren: Molecular Neurophysiology Section, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health

Nature Communications, 2014, vol. 5, issue 1, 1-6

Abstract: Abstract Many voltage-gated potassium channels open in response to membrane depolarization and then inactivate within milliseconds. Neurons use these channels to tune their excitability. In Shaker K+ channels, inactivation is caused by the cytoplasmic amino terminus, termed the inactivation gate. Despite having four such gates, inactivation is caused by the movement of a single gate into a position that occludes ion permeation. The pathway that this single inactivation gate takes into its inactivating position remains unknown. Here we show that a single gate threads through the intracellular entryway of its own subunit, but the tip of the gate has sufficient freedom to interact with all four subunits deep in the pore, and does so with equal probability. This pathway demonstrates that flexibility afforded by the inactivation peptide segment at the tip of the N-terminus is used to mediate function.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms5050 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:5:y:2014:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms5050

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms5050

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().