Hjem

The purified sodium pump reconstituted in artificial membranes expresses all the features of the pump system described by physiologists and biochemists in intact cells. In other words: it is a fully autonomous molecular machine, which does need neither interaction with other membrane systems to be functional, nor interaction with hypothetical intra- and extracellular regulators: all the required information for the pump activity is contained within the sodium pump molecule (Na,K-ATPase) itself. This overview of basic properties of the sodium pump may be interesting for students in biology or medicine, as well as for researchers interested in ion-transport systems. Yet it is written in a way which should allow also the non-specialist to comprehend the working of the sodium pump, all the more since there are many illustrations and didactic schemes.