How Sodium and Calcium Ions Pass Through Batrachotoxin-Bound Sodium Channel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Steroidal sodium channel agonist batrachotoxin (BTX), one of the most potent animal toxins, dramatically increases calcium permeation and alters other channel characteristics. In a cryoEM structure of rat sodium channel Nav1.5 with two BTX-B molecules, one toxin binds between repeats III and IV and exposes to the pore lumen two oxygen atoms and protonatable nitrogen. The mechanism of ion permeation and selectivity in BTX-bound channel is unclear. Here Monte Carlo energy-minimized profiles of sodium and calcium ions pulled through the pore were computed in models with various protonated states of the DEKA lysine and BTX-B. The only model where the ions readily passed by the DEKA lysine and BTX-B involved their deprotonated nitrogens. In this model, electronegative atoms of BTX-B attracted a permeant cation that stabilized the "dunked" lysine through electrostatic interactions and nearby water molecules. This would retard reprotonation of the lysine and its "uplifting" to the DEKA carboxylates, which otherwise attracts calcium. The results suggest how sodium and calcium ions pass through BTX-bound sodium channel and why BTX increases calcium permeation. The study supports an earlier hypothesis that during the sodium ion permeation cycle, the DEKA lysine alternates between uplifted and dunked conformations in the protonated and deprotonated states, respectively, while the sodium-displaced proton and the sodium ion nullify the net electrical charge at the DEKA region.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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".