Non-small cell lung cancer is often diagnosed at advanced stages, and many patients are still treated with classical chemotherapy. The unselective nature of chemotherapy often results in severe myelosuppression. Previous studies showed that protein-coding mutations could not fully explain the predisposition to myelosuppression.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBipolar cells of the retina are among the smallest neurons of the nervous system. For this reason, compared to other neurons, their delay in signaling is minimal. Additionally, the small bipolar cell surface combined with the low membrane conductance causes very little attenuation in the signal from synaptic input to the terminal.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA selectivity filter is a gate in ion channels that is responsible for the selection and fast conduction of particular ions across the membrane (with high throughput rates of 10 ions s and a high 1:10 discrimination rate between ions). It is made of four strands as the backbone, and each strand is composed of sequences of five amino acids connected by peptide units H-N-C=O in which the main molecules in the backbone that interact with ions in the filter are carbonyl (C=O) groups that mimic the transient interactions of ion with binding sites during ion conduction. It has been suggested that quantum coherence and possible emergence of resonances in the backbone carbonyl groups may play a role in mediating ion conduction and selectivity in the filter.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBipolar cells of the magnocellular pathway in the primate retina can generate action potentials because they have an axonal segment with high sodium channel density, comparable to the sodium channel band in retinal ganglion cells or pyramidal cells. The similarity between the non-human primate and the human retina is of interest for the research on retinal implants for the blind, and especially, the conditions to elicit sodium spikes in bipolar cells using extracellular stimulation. A comparison of excitation characteristics of three model neurons, a bipolar cell, a retinal ganglion cell, and a cortical pyramidal cell, demonstrates the similarities and differences regarding stimulation with microelectrodes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn this paper, we investigate the effect of noise and disorder on the efficiency of excitation energy transfer (EET) in a N = 5 sites linear chain with 'static' dipole-dipole couplings. In fact, here, the disordered chain is a toy model for one strand of the selectivity filter backbone in ion channels. It has recently been discussed that the presence of quantum coherence in the selectivity filter is possible and can play a role in mediating ion-conduction and ion-selectivity in the selectivity filter.
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