From our research

The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is an important model organism. It contains an ion channel family, termed PPKs, with homology to ASICs and ENaC in humans. In our last study, which was performed in collaboration with the group of Simon Sprecher from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and which was published in Scientific Reports (click here to view the article), we have functionally characterized PPK12 in a heterologous expression system. We discovered that PPK12 is a constitutively open sodium channel with a low sodium affinity. This property allows PPK12 to detect and differentiate also high concentrations of sodium. Therefore, we speculate that PPK12 plays a role in detecting high concentrations of sodium salts. Moreover, our results show that PPKs are amenable to functional characterization in the oocyte expression system.