From: Panchenko, Anna (NIH/NLM/NCBI)
Sent: Thursday, March 03, 2005 10:41 AM
To: structure@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Subject: seminar tomorrow

Hi everyone,

We have a visitor tomorrow Tom McCormack from University of  Florida. He 
will give a seminar tomorrow at 2 p.m. in the 8-th floor conference room.
Let me know if somebody wants to talk to him.

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Ion Channel and Receptor  Subunits :
      From   Sequence to    Structure

-Tom McCormack, PhD
  Dept. Pharmacology
  University of  Florida

Membrane  proteins  represent the next wave of  structural  biology.
Since ion channels are among the  most  abundant  membrane proteins,
investigating their structure will be  critical  for understanding  how
they truly  function.  By combining  evolutionary, genomic, structural and
electrophysiological data  we can gain a  greater  understanding of
voltage-gated and   ligand-gated  channels. Evolutionary analysis  reveals
that some ion channel subunits have evolved from ancestral enzymes and 
have most likely  lost  enzymatic  activity, which illustrates the 
serendipity of molecular evolution. Structural data for  membrane
proteins  and their auxiliary subunits can combined with  what was 
previously  known  from classical electrophysiology or  other methods such 
as point mutation. By combing  these  different  areas of  research, a 
more global understanding of ion channels and  receptors  is   now 
possible.