Recessive mutations in myosin 15, a class XV unconventional myosin, cause profound congenital deafness in humans and both deafness and vestibular dysfunction in mice homozygous for the shaker 2 and shaker 2(J) alleles. The shaker 2 allele is a previously described missense mutation of a highly conserved residue in the motor domain of myosin XV. The shaker 2(J) lesion, in contrast, is a 14.7 kb ...

The quiver/sleepless (qvr/sss) gene encodes a small, glycosylphosphatidylinositol-anchored protein that plays a critical role in the regulation of sleep in Drosophila. Loss-of-function mutations in qvr/sss severely suppress sleep and effect multiple changes in in situ Shaker K(+) currents, including decreased magnitude, slower time-to-peak, and cumulative inactivation. Recently, we demonstrated...

A 20 amino acid synthetic peptide, corresponding to the amino-terminal region of the Shaker B (ShB) K+ channel and responsible for its fast inactivation, can block large conductance Ca(2+)-dependent K+ channels from rat brain and muscle. The ShB inactivation peptide produces two kinetically distinct blocking events in these channels. At lower concentrations, it produces short blocks, and at hig...

Voltage-sensitive K channels speed membrane repolarization, thus narrowing action potential (AP) waveforms. The spike waveform at synaptic terminals strongly influences the kinetics of neurotransmitter release. Because recording APs at synaptic terminals is difficult, however, researchers typically examine EPSPs to identify contributors to presynaptic waveform. For example, mutation of shaker, ...

Shaker genes encode voltage-gated potassium channels (Kv). We have shown previously that genes from Shaker subfamilies Kv1.1, 1.2, 1.4 are expressed in rabbit kidney. Recent functional and molecular evidence indicate that the predominant potassium conductance of the kidney medullary cell line GRB-PAP1 is composed of Shaker-like potassium channels. We now report the molecular cloning and functio...

We studied the structure of the C terminus of the Shaker potassium channel. The 3D structures of the full-length and a C-terminal deletion (Delta C) mutant of Shaker were determined by electron microscopy and single-particle analysis. The difference map between the full-length and the truncated channels clearly shows a compact density, located on the sides of the T1 domain, that corresponds to ...

Jean-Luc Arrègle, EMLYON Business School (editor) Laure Cabantous, Cass Business School (editor) Stewart Clegg, University of Technology, Sydney (editor) Olivier Germain, Université du Québec à Montréal (editor, book reviews) Karim Mignonac, Université de Toulouse 1 (editor) Philippe Monin, EMLYON Business School (editor) Tyrone Pitsis, University of Newcastle (editor) José Pla-Barber, Universi...

Centrally released oxytocin (OT) is believed to attenuate the response of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis to psychogenic stress. To test this hypothesis, we measured plasma corticosterone concentrations and Fos-immunoreactive protein in the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus (PVN) and limbic brain areas of female wild-type and OT knockout mice that were exposed to a shake...