Department of Biological Sciences tion and action potential generation. In frogs, it was Columbia University shown that out of a panel of some 65 odors about half New York, New York 10027 generated a biochemically significant increase in cAMP (Sklar et al., 1986). This was initially taken as evidence that a second pathway might exist for these odors. However , a simple but elegant experiment by...

This paper looks at ion channels as an example of the pharmacologist's stock in trade, the action of an agonist on a receptor to produce a response. Looked at in this way, ion channels have been helpful because they are still the only system which is simple enough for quantitative investigation of transduction mechanisms. A short history is given of attempts to elucidate what happens between th...

Mechanotransduction, the conversion of physical forces into biochemical signals, is essential for various physiological processes such as the conscious sensations of touch and hearing, and the unconscious sensation of blood flow. Mechanically activated (MA) ion channels have been proposed as sensors of physical force, but the identity of these channels and an understanding of how mechanical for...

Modeling of biological ion channels has a long history, going back more then 100 yr (Hille 1984). In the old, premolecular biology era, interpretation of these simple models provided the primary source of information about channel structure. As molecular biology and, now, x-ray diffraction have provided direct information about structure, modeling has been reduced to playing more of a secondary...

The Involvement of Ion Channels in the Neoplastic Phenotype Ion channels have long been known to be involved in the regulation of a variety of biological functions ranging from the control of cell excitability to the regulation of cell volume and proliferation. Because of the ubiquitous presence of ion channels in virtually all cells and their critical involvement in diverse biological function...