Advanced Biophysical Chemistry: Membrane Transport and Ionic Channels

Catalog description

With the realization that a controlled transport of materials between the cell and the environment and between the various compartments of a cell is essential for the cell’s proper functioning, a great deal of studies has been devoted to membrane transport. This course is an account of the physic-chemical principles and mechanisms found to be involved in the membrane transport. Ionic channel; are elementary excitable elements in the cell membranes of nerve, muscle, and other tissues. Sperm, white blood cells, and endocrine glands all also require channels to act. They produce and transducer electrical signals in living cells. Recently, new techniques of biochemistry, pharmacology, and membrane biophysics have played an increasingly wide role in studying ionic transport across biomembranes. This course is meant to be accessible to undergraduate and graduate students in chemistry, physics, biology, pharmacology, physiology, a and other discipline who are interested in excitable cells. Being multidisciplinary per se, the course introduces all the major ideas that a student in the area would be expected to know including physic-chemical principles of membranes: theories of membrane transport: passive, facilitated, and active transport; membrane electrochemistry and physiology, ionic channels and their reconstitution in lipid bilayers, blocking and separation of Na, K and Ca currents through ionic channels; experimental techniques for the study and characterization of biomembranes and ionic channels. Lab experiments on fabrication spherical (liposomes) and planar lipid bilayers are also included as part of the course. Upon completion of the course, students are expected to understand the molecular and physicochemical mechanisms underlying the ionic permeability changes in the course of excitation and signaling which can be accounted for by the opening and closing of…