Much of the devastation of stroke and head trauma is due to damage caused the overproduction of a substance in the brain called glutamate. Preventing this damage has been impossible, until now, as many drugs don’t cross the so-called blood-brain bar…
WASHINGTON, D.C., November 23, 2010 — To the causal aquarium visitor, the jellyfish doesn’t seem to be a particularly powerful swimmer; compared to a fish, it glides slowly and peacefully.
But for Janna Nawroth, a graduate student at the Californ…
Right now, in your body, tiny pumps in the fatty membranes surrounding all your cells are hard at work pushing select charged ions, such as sodium, potassium or calcium, through those membranes. Like a water pump in a high-rise apartment building overcoming the force of gravity to move water up to a tank on its roof, these ion pumps work against “electrochemical gradients” to transport ions from one side of the membrane to the other. Now, researchers at The Rockefeller University report using palytoxin, a deadly coral-derived toxin, to pry open perhaps the ion pump’s deepest secret: that it is essentially a more elaborate version of an ion channel.