(Life Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA; Department of Cell Biology, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA)
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折叠
Structure and Mechanism of Water Channels
Sui Haixin*;Ren Gang
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(Life Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA; Department of Cell Biology, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA)
The mechanism of water transport across biological membranes has been a longstanding problem in physiology and cell biology. The discoveiy and characterization of the AQPl water channel protein leads to the identification of the aquaporin family of water channels which is responsible for the water permeability of biological membranes. The atom-ic structure of mammalian AQPl reveals how this family of proteins transports water molecules, but not other small mole-cules and ions (including protons), rapidly across cell membranes. This review summarizes the discovery of water chan-nel proteins and their mechanism of water-specific transport.