Issues

By excluding scientist survivors from leadership of the Action Collaborative, the NASEM undermines its goal of positive culture change to reduce sexual harassment.

Pugh highlights recent work ruling out a role for ultraweak photon emission in spontaneous photon-like events in retinal rods.

In order to dance the tango, Lac permease must slide smoothly between at least two conformations, one open to the outside of the cell membrane and one open to the inside. This Viewpoint describes recent studies on the structure and mechanism lactose permease utilizes to perform its tango, a dance involving symport of an H⁺ and a sugar.

It has been suggested that retinal “dark light” is caused by photons emitted by the retina itself. The authors show that the “biophoton” radiation from the retina can be detected, but its intensity is ≥100 times lower than necessary to produce the measured physiological noise understood to arise from the spontaneous activation of rhodopsin.

P2X receptors (P2XRs) are ligand-gated cation channels involved in pain and inflammation. Gasparri et al. show that the backbone carbonyl atoms of amino acid residue Thr184 are involved in ligand discrimination, while those of Lys69 contribute mostly to ligand recognition by rat P2X2Rs.

Identification of the binding sites for small molecules that alleviate gating defects in CFTR would assist rational drug design for the treatment of cystic fibrosis. Yeh et al. identify two potential binding sites for prototypical CFTR potentiators at the interface of CFTR’s two transmembrane domains.

Extraocular muscles are specialized skeletal muscles expressing a particular set of proteins involved in calcium homeostasis, including RYR3. Eckhardt et al. investigate extraocular muscle function in ryr3^−/− mice and show that ablation of RYR3 significantly impacts vision.

Acid-sensing ion channels (ASICs) are voltage-independent cation channels that are modulated by extracellular pH fluctuations. Lee et al. identify three neutral residues in the N terminus (T25, T39, and I40) that are critical for rapid resensitization of homomeric and heteromeric ASIC2a channels.

Glial-like supporting cells of the olfactory epithelium are involved in a variety of processes important to the function of this tissue. Henriques et al. find that supporting cells exhibit an ATP-induced, Ca²⁺-sensitive Cl⁻ current produced by TMEM16A Cl⁻ channels.