We are two students currently in first year of our licence in the university of Bordeaux 1.
Our goal is to share with you our research about bio cell, and more specifically about membrane's transporters.
1) What are membrane's transporters, and what for?:
Such as an electrical battery, cells have a (negative) charge which is the opposite of the charge's outside of the cell. This difference of charge is caused according to the ratio of the sodium Na+ and the potassium K+, charged positively. if there is more K+ than Na+ in an environment, this one is negative, because of the important mass of chloride charged negatively. Otherwise, the environment has a positive charge.
The distribution of charges between the inside of the cell and the environment outside has to be different for the fundamental role played in terms of functions of the cell.
But, the permease lets diffusing some metabolites through the neighboring environments. In the long term, without a transport way which maintain the ratio Na+∕K+, there will have the same quantity of sodium and potassium on every environments. The cell will lose her negative charge, and will don't operate anymore.
The membrane is impermeable to hydrophilic molecules. Membrane's transporters are proteins which allows metabolites to go through the cell's membrane. They are selective and control the flow of metabolites accurately.
We can find two different membrane's transporters:
However, there is another type of membrane's transporter: co-transporters (symporter and antiporter). They can transport from 10 power 2 to 10 power 4 molecules per seconde.
2) Why do we have chosen this topic?
We found this topic interesting because it is about research on proteins which maintain cells to control the electrochemical gradient (or balance charges' potential) in the cell or in the extracellular matrix. Through articles in this blog, we'll show you in detail different possible ways of transport of these macromolecules, and how they do it.
