If you ever had a set of Micronauts – toy robots with removable body parts – you probably had fun swapping their heads, imagining how it would affect their behavior. Scientists supported by the National Institutes of Health have been performing similar experiments on ion channels – pores in our nerve cells – to sort out the channels’ key functional parts. In the November 15 issue of Nature, one group of researchers shows that a part of ion channels called the paddle is uniquely transplantable between different channels. Writing in the same issue, another group exploited this property to probe the three-dimensional structure of ion channels on an atomic scale.
