common evolutionary origins of mechanosensitive ion channels in archaea, bacteria and cell-walled eukarya共同进化起源mechanosensitive离子通道在古生菌,细菌和cell-walled真核生物.pdfVIP

Archaea 1, 35–44 © 2002 Heron Publishing—Victoria, Canada Common evolutionary origins of mechanosensitive ion channels in Archaea, Bacteria and cell-walled Eukarya ANNA KLODA 1 and BORIS MARTINAC1,2 1 Department of Pharmacology, University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia 2 Author to whom correspondence should be addressed (bmartinac@.au) Received July 16, 2001; accepted September 24, 2001; published online November 5, 2001 Summary The ubiquity of mechanosensitive (MS) channels nels, there is little knowledge available on the structure and triggered a search for their functional homologs in Archaea. function of, and the mutual relationships among, the wide Archaeal MS channels were found to share a common ances- range of MS channels found in living organisms. During the tral origin with bacterial MS channels of large and small con- last decade, however, major progress has been made in the un- ductance, and sequence homology with several proteins that derstanding of the biophysical principles and evolutionary ori- most likely function as MS ion channels in prokaryotic and gins of mechanosensory transduction by cloning and struc- eukaryotic cell-walled organisms. Although bacterial and tural and functional characterization of several MS channels archaeal MS channels differ in conductive and mechano- found in bacterial and archaeal cells (Hamill and Martinac sensitive properties, they share similar gating mechanisms trig- 2001, Martinac 2001). In addition, it has recently been shown gered by mechanical force transmitted via the lipid bilayer. In that bacterial and archaeal MS channels form a family of this review, we suggest that MS channels of Archaea can bridge mechanosensitive membrane proteins de