OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Dynamic conformational changes of ion channel proteins during activation gating determine their function as carriers of current. The relationship between these molecular movements and channel function over the physiological timescale of the action potential (AP) has not been fully established due to limitations of existing techniques. We constructed a library of possible cardiac IKs protein conformations and applied a combination of protein segmentation and energy linearization to study this relationship computationally. Simulations reproduced the effects of the beta-subunit (KCNE1) on the alpha-subunit (KCNQ1) dynamics and function, observed in experiments. Mechanistically, KCNE1 increased the probability of “visiting” conducting pore conformations on activation trajectories, thereby increasing IKs current. KCNE1 slowed IKs activation by impeding the voltage sensor (VS) movement and reducing its coupling to pore opening. Conformational changes along activation trajectories determined that the S4-S5 linker (S4S5L) plays an important role in these modulatory effects by KCNE1. Integration of these molecular structure-based IKs dynamics into a model of human cardiac ventricular myocyte, revealed that KCNQ1-KCNE1 interaction is essential for normal AP repolarization.
