Issues

Cover picture: The BK voltage– and ligand-activated channel exhibits a hierarchical domain organization whereby gating domain transitions are coupled to pore opening. This structural hierarchy (left) translates into a functional hierarchy of domain interactions (right), further reflected in the mathematical description of the gating model partition function (bottom). Energy parsing in such systems requires delineating the contribution of the entire domain interaction network. In this issue, Chowdhury and Chanda (11–28), and Sigg (29–60) describe how this is achieved in a model-independent manner. (Left panel modified from Fig. 1, Pantazis et al. 2010. http://dx.doi.org/10.1085/jgp.201010503; right panel, see article by Yifrach, 3–9.)