Crystallographic insights into sodium-channel modulation by the β4 subunit
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Voltage-gated sodium (Nav) channels are embedded in a multicomponent membrane signaling complex that plays a crucial role in cellular excitability. Although the mechanism remains unclear, β-subunits modify Nav channel function and cause debilitating disorders when mutated. While investigating whether β-subunits also influence ligand interactions, we found that β4 dramatically alters toxin binding to Nav1.2. To explore these observations further, we solved the crystal structure of the extracellular β4 domain and identified (58)Cys as an exposed residue that, when mutated, eliminates the influence of β4 on toxin pharmacology. Moreover, our results suggest the presence of a docking site that is maintained by a cysteine bridge buried within the hydrophobic core of β4. Disrupting this bridge by introducing a β1 mutation implicated in epilepsy repositions the (58)Cys-containing loop and disrupts β4 modulation of Nav1.2. Overall, the principles emerging from this work (i) help explain tissue-dependent variations in Nav channel pharmacology; (ii) enable the mechanistic interpretation of β-subunit-related disorders; and (iii) provide insights in designing molecules capable of correcting aberrant β-subunit behavior.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".