Highly charged meetings

摘要

When it comes to proteins and their environments, opposites repel. So how is the highly charged, polar helix of a transmembrane ion channel accommodated by a non-polar membrane? Easily, if the charges are buried.rnEarly in any biochemistry course, students are told that charged amino acids are not happy in hydrophobic (water-repelling) environments. Because the basic unit of biological membranes - the lipid bilayer - has a hydrophobic core, it follows that the a-helices of membrane-bound proteins should rarely contain charged amino acids.