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Letter from the Editor
Launching Channels: A New Milestone in the Ion Channel Field
Gerald W. Zamponi
volume 1 | issue 1
January/February 2007We now provide open access to journal articles published online for one year or more. This article may be downloaded at the following link:
Download PDF If the document does not open, please right-click on the link (control-click on a Macintosh) and select the option to save the file to disk.
Ion channels underlie a plethora of physiological functions not only in the animal kingdom, but also in plants and microorganisms such as bacteria. Even though we have only known of the existence of channels for about four decades, a PubMed search for channels yields over 120,000 papers, with 40,000 of those appearing in the past five years alone. Even before ion channels had been formally discovered, their existence was hypothesized by Hodgkin and Huxley who were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine for their work on electrical activity in axons. Subsequent Nobel awards for ion channel electrophysiology techniques (Bert Sakmann and Erwin Neher for Medicine in 1991) and ion channel structure and physiology (Rod MacKinnon and Peter Agre for Chemistry in 2003) underscored the contemporary importance of ion channel research. It is noteworthy that single channel recording is one of the most sensitive techniques in biology – allowing researchers to study the function of a single molecule in its native environment in real time.
Authors
Gerald W. Zamponi
University of Calgary
We now provide open access to journal articles published online for one year or more. This article may be downloaded at the following link:
Download PDF If the document does not open, please right-click on the link (control-click on a Macintosh) and select the option to save the file to disk.