Volovik Marta V, Batishchev Oleg V
Laboratory of Bioelectrochemistry, A.N. Frumkin Institute of Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia.
J Biomol Struct Dyn. 2024 Oct 4:1-20. doi: 10.1080/07391102.2024.2411523.
Evolution from precellular supramolecular assemblies to cellular world originated from the ability to make a barrier between the interior of the cell and the outer environment. This step resulted from the possibility to form a membrane, which preserves the cell like a wall of the castle. However, every castle needs gates for trading, i.e. in the case of cell, for controlled exchange of substances. These 'gates' should have the mechanism of opening and closing, guards, entry rules, and so on. Different structures are known to be able to make membrane permeable to various substances, from ions to macromolecules. They are amphipathic peptides, their assemblies, sophisticated membrane channels with numerous transmembrane domains, etc. Upon evolving, cellular world preserved and selected many variants, which, finally, have provided both prokaryotes and eukaryotes with highly selective and regulated ion channels. However, various simpler variants of ion channels are found in viruses. Despite the origin of viruses is still under debates, they have evolved parallelly with the cellular forms of life. Being initial form of the enveloped organisms, reduction of protocells or their escaped parts, viruses might be fingerprints of the evolutionary steps of cellular structures like ion channels. Therefore, viroporins may provide us a necessary information about selection between high functionality and less complex structure in supporting all the requirements for controlled membrane permeability. In this review we tried to elucidate these compromises and show the possible way of the evolution of ion channels, from peptides to complex multi-subunit structures, basing on viral examples.
从细胞前超分子聚集体到细胞世界的进化起源于在细胞内部和外部环境之间形成屏障的能力。这一步骤源于形成膜的可能性，膜像城堡的墙壁一样保护着细胞。然而，每个城堡都需要用于交易的大门，即就细胞而言，用于物质的受控交换。这些“大门”应该有打开和关闭的机制、守卫、进入规则等等。已知不同的结构能够使膜对从离子到大分子的各种物质具有通透性。它们是两亲性肽、它们的聚集体、具有众多跨膜结构域的复杂膜通道等等。在进化过程中，细胞世界保留并选择了许多变体，最终为原核生物和真核生物提供了高度选择性和受调控的离子通道。然而，在病毒中发现了各种更简单的离子通道变体。尽管病毒的起源仍在争论中，但它们与细胞生命形式平行进化。作为包膜生物的初始形式，原细胞或其逃逸部分的简化，病毒可能是离子通道等细胞结构进化步骤的指纹。因此，病毒孔蛋白可能为我们提供关于在支持受控膜通透性的所有要求时高功能性和较简单结构之间选择的必要信息。在这篇综述中，我们试图阐明这些折衷，并基于病毒实例展示离子通道从肽到复杂多亚基结构的可能进化方式。
