Big congratulations to Zeshan for his heroic effort on deciphering how M1 and pre-M1 contribute to ion selectivity in ASICs and ENaCs. Him, Matthias and Tim were fortunate enough to be assisted by strong collaborators from both academia (Mike Althaus, Bonn) and industry (Nanion Technologies, Germany), but it was Zeshan who really spear-headed this project. It ended up involving chimeras, non-canonical amino acids, automated and single channel patch-clamp and much more and really helped us understand key differences between ASICs and their constitutively active cousins from the ENaCs family. The paper just came out in JGP.
