Aquaporin Gating: A New Twist to Unravel Permeation through Water Channels.

ABSTRACT: Aquaporins (AQPs) are small transmembrane tetrameric proteins that facilitate water, solute and gas exchange. Their presence has been extensively reported in the biological membranes of almost all living organisms. Although their discovery is much more recent than ion transport systems, different biophysical approaches have contributed to confirm that permeation through each monomer is consistent with closed and open states, introducing the term gating mechanism into the field. The study of AQPs in their native membrane or overexpressed in heterologous systems have experimentally demonstrated that water membrane permeability can be reversibly modified in response to specific modulators. For some regulation mechanisms, such as pH changes, evidence for gating is also supported by high-resolu

SUBMITTER: Ozu M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9604103 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature