In retrospect, when Jardetzky 1966 published a “simple allosteric model for membrane pumps,” he initiated a conceptual movement away from the (then still) prevailing anthropomorphic view of transporters and pumps as “carriers” in the literal sense, membrane-bound entities that somehow made their way across the membrane, loaded with cargo. The idea of an “alternating access” model (as it is now called) as a way to explain transmembrane transport had already been proposed by Patlak 1957 and by Vidaver 1966, but Jardetzky 1966 and especially Läuger 1979 popularized it.
A trio of papers in this volume (Lu and Hilgemann 1999a,Lu and Hilgemann 1999b; Hilgemann and Lu 1999) presents an alternating-access model for a GABA transporter (GAT1, the first to be cloned, by Guastella et al. 1990). The experimental kinetic database already accumulated on...
