Frontiers in Bioscience-Landmark (FBL) is published by IMR Press from Volume 26 Issue 5 (2021). Previous articles were published by another publisher on a subscription basis, and they are hosted by IMR Press on imrpress.com as a courtesy and upon agreement with Frontiers in Bioscience.
The ryanodine receptor channel is an intracellular membrane Ca2+-release channel. The investigation of ion translocation and discrimination in individual channels under voltage-clamp conditions has revealed that the channel can sustain very high rates of cation translocation, has high affinity for divalent cations and displays relatively poor discrimination between physiologically relevant cations. In this article I will discuss the mechanisms underlying these characteristic properties, the regions of the channel molecule likely to be involved in ion handling and speculate on the structure of the conduction pathway of Ca2+-release channels.