Issues

Abderemane-Ali et al. investigated the mechanisms underlying self-resistance in poison dart frogs and poison birds.

X-ray diffraction is an important probe of muscle physiology, but extracting reliable information from some of the observations is difficult, and mistakes have been made. We discuss how best to extract information from x-ray diffraction studies to give reliable conclusions.

In this paper, one possible reason for the intensity change of the M3 meridional reflection of muscle x-ray diffraction patterns (which changes with increasing sarcomere length) is discussed in terms of increasing axial misalignment of the myosin filaments.

Kemp et al. show that the hERG channel activator RPR260243 restores the repolarizing current of a mutant variant of the channel associated with LQTS2 with little effect on its resurgent current. This drug represents a therapeutic opportunity for the treatment of arrhythmia associated with LQTS2.

Despite high similarity in sequence and structure, epithelial sodium channels display at least 50-fold higher sodium selectivity than acid-sensing ion channels. Here, Sheikh et al. show that sodium selectivity is likely achieved by different mechanisms in these related channels.

Here, Björkgren et al. use whole-cell patch-clamp to show that the potassium channel Kir7.1 is stimulated by progesterone in the choroid plexus epithelium, as well as in other tissues in which Kir7.1 is present, and that the effect is specific to this steroid hormone.

Beurg et al. report that the conductance of cochlear hair cell mechanotransducer channels inferred from single-channel events is larger than using noise analysis, which underestimates size due to filtering of fast openings. The difference leads to a first estimate of the channel activation time constant.