Quantitative modeling of currents from a voltage gated ion channel undergoing fast inactivation

Global repression by tailless during segmentation

The orphan nuclear receptor Tailless (Tll) exhibits conserved roles in brain formation and maintenance that are shared, for example, with vertebrate orthologous forms (Tlx). However, the early expression of tll in two gap domains in the segmentation cascade of Drosophila is unusual even for most other insects. Here we investigate tll regulation on pair-rule stripes. With ectopic misexpression of tll we detected unexpected repression of almost all pair-rule stripes of hairy (h), even-skipped (eve), runt (run), and fushi-tarazu (ftz). Examining Tll embryonic ChIP-chip data with regions mapped as Cis-Regulatory Modules (CRMs) of pair-rule stripes we verified Tll interactions to these regions. With the ChIP-chip data we also verified Tll interactions to the CRMs of gap domains and in the misexpression assay, Tll-mediated repression on Kruppel (Kr), kni (kni) and giant (gt) according to their differential sensitivity to Tll. These results with gap genes confirmed previous data from the literature and argue against indirect repression roles of Tll in the striped pattern. Moreover, the prediction of Tll binding sites in the CRMs of eve stripes and the mathematical modeling of their removal using an experimentally validated theoretical framework shows effects on eve stripes compatible with the absence of a repressor binding to the CRMs. In addition, modeling increased tll levels in the embryo results in the differential repression of eve stripes, agreeing well with the results of the misexpression assay. In genetic assays we investigated eve 5, that is strongly repressed by the ectopic domain and representative of more central stripes not previously implied to be under direct regulation of tll. While this stripe is little affected in tll-, its posterior border is expanded in gt- but detected with even greater expansion in gt-;tll-. We end up by discussing tll with key roles in combinatorial repression mechanisms to contain the expression of medial patterns of the segmentation cascade in the extremities of the embryo.

A conserved pre-block interaction motif regulates potassium channel activation and N-type inactivation

N-type inactivation occurs when the N-terminus of a potassium channel binds into the open pore of the channel. This study examined the relationship between activation and steady state inactivation for mutations affecting the N-type inactivation properties of the Aplysia potassium channel AKv1 expressed in Xenopus oocytes. The results show that the traditional single-step model for N-type inactivation fails to properly account for the observed relationship between steady state channel activation and inactivation curves. We find that the midpoint of the steady state inactivation curve depends in part on a secondary interaction between the channel core and a region of the N-terminus just proximal to the pore blocking peptide that we call the Inactivation Proximal (IP) region. The IP interaction with the channel core produces a negative shift in the activation and inactivation curves, without blocking the pore. A tripeptide motif in the IP region was identified in a large number of different N-type inactivation domains most likely reflecting convergent evolution in addition to direct descent. Point mutating a conserved hydrophobic residue in this motif eliminates the gating voltage shift, accelerates recovery from inactivation and decreases the amount of pore block produced during inactivation. The IP interaction we have identified likely stabilizes the open state and positions the pore blocking region of the N-terminus at the internal opening to the transmembrane pore by forming a Pre-Block (P state) interaction with residues lining the side window vestibule of the channel.