ePoster · Biophysics
Electrogenic Na+/K+-ATPases constrain excitable cell activity and pose additional evolutionary pressure
Liz Weerdmeester, Jan-Hendrik Schleimer, Susanne Schreiber · Bernstein Conference 2024
The evolution of the Na$^+$/K$^+$-ATPase in ancestral methanogenic archaea also lay the foundation for the energetics of energy-intensive signaling tissues like the metazoan nervous systems billions of years later [1]. The electrogenic property of this pump, which leads to activity-dependent feedback [2], seems a useful exaptation for certain encoding paradigms, cell-intrinsic bursting dynamics, and accelerated ion homeostasis [3-5]. For nerve and muscle cells that need to be tonically active for long stretches of time (on the order of minutes to hours), the electrogenicity of the pump has fur