VOLTAGE-GATED ION CHANNEL PROTEIN RESOURCE DATABASE

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Voltage gated channels are one of the ways that materials move into and out of cells. They are important across biology. A channel can either be open or closed; the transition is called gating. However, these proteins do not crystallize easily and two-dimensional methods have had to be developed to consider their structure. Each channel protein consists of six hydrophobic membrane-spanning segments and a membrane insertion region. The ability to predict or at least have good models for these transmembrane proteins is a significant need for the research community. The techniques for this are now just beginning. At the moment, there are no good homologues to VGC proteins in the PDB, because of the difficulty of crystallization. However, alignment of sequence is possible. Three-dimensional protein homology models will be developed from these aligned sequences, using a variety of software packages developed by the group. The resulting tools will be available on the web. Once the first models are made, all similarly aligned proteins can be automatically predicted. This effort will produce models that could be used to refine the structure data coming from new studies and methods of considering membrane proteins.