An endoplasmic reticulum-retained atrial fibrillation-linked connexin40 mutant impairs atrial gap junction channel function
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Connexin40 (Cx40)-containing gap-junction channels are expressed in the atrial myocardium and provide a low-resistance passage for rapid impulse propagation. A germline mutation in the GJA5 gene, which encodes Cx40, resulting in a truncated Cx40 (Q49X) was identified in a large Chinese family with lone (idiopathic) atrial fibrillation (AF). This mutation co-segregated with seven AF probands in an autosomal-dominant way over generations. To test the hypothesis that this Cx40 mutant affects the distribution and function of atrial gap junctions, we studied the Q49X mutant in gap-junction-deficient HeLa and N2A cells. The Q49X mutant, unlike wild-type Cx40, was typically localized in the cytoplasm and failed to form gap-junction plaques at cell-cell interfaces. When the Q49X mutant was co-expressed with Cx40 or Cx43, the mutant substantially reduced the gap-junction plaque formation of Cx40 and Cx43. Electrophysiological studies revealed no electrical coupling of cell pairs expressing the mutant alone and a significant decrease in the coupling conductance when the mutant was co-expressed with Cx40 or Cx43. Further colocalization experiments with the organelle residential proteins indicate that Q49X was retained in the endoplasmic reticulum. These findings provide evidence that the Q49X mutant is capable of impairing gap-junction distribution and function of key atrial connexins, which might play a role in the predisposition to and onset of AF.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".