Monumental paper of unnatural amino acid (UAA) mutagenesis in calcium release channels from Isabella Derler and team! Light-activated calcium release in complexes without STIM1 and tons of insights to structure function.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36458-4

#Chapeau #IonChannels #Optogenetics #GeneticCodeExpansion

Nice to see my friends Lilia Leisle, Alessio Accardi, Chris Ahern and more teaming up! Here, CLC-type ion channels, widely responsible for #chloride balance, were subjected to unnatural amino acid #mutagenesis. In a subtle example of the genre, the peptide backbone was changed at individual sites by introducing alpha-hydroxy amino acids.This showed that backbone amides coordinate permeating chloride ions.

#biophysics #IonChannels #physiology #GeneticCodeExpansion

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35279-1

Nice to see this work from Alberto Gonzalez and Teresa Giraldez and collaborators online! My part was small but very happy with how it has turned out. Beautiful state-dependence of crosslinks, fingerprinting movements of the BK channel.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.15.520511v1.article-info

#IonChannels #biophysics #GeneticCodeExpansion #Calcium