You are cordially invited to the SCL seminar of the Center for the Study of Complex Systems, which will be held on Friday, 27 December 2019 at 11:00 in the library reading room “Dr Dragan Popović" of the Institute of Physics Belgrade. The talk entitled

Sodium transport in mammalian two-pore channels

will be given by Dr Stefan Milenković (University of Cagliari, Italy). Abstract of the talk:

Although being in focus in the last decades, two-pore channels (TPCs) remain partially comprehended. Their importance for vacuolar (plants) and organellar (animals) function highlights them as a very attractive to study, both theoretically and experimentally. A particular boost for theoretical examinations has been made with recent, high-resolution x-ray and cryo-EM structures. These findings have enabled for efficient and precise computational studies at atomistic level. Here we report a set of simulations performed on a mammalian TPC1, a voltage and ligand gated sodium selective channel. The simulations were used for a thorough analysis of the TPC1 behavior in presence and absence of ligand (PtdIns(3,5)P2), with a special accent on the TPC1’s bottleneck, hydrophobic (HF) gate. Moreover, we have described a potential passage of sodium ions through the HF gate by means of metadynamics (MTD) simulations and estimated the sodium conductance. Estimated computationally, this conductance is in excellent agreement with its experimental value.

Graphical abstract:


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